4 Reasons Why Antivirus is Not Enough To Prevent Cyber Attack

If you think that you are fully protected by your antivirus, then you should enquire about the famous cyberattack by Chinese hackers on the popular New York Times. The company is said to have had many antivirus software in place, yet the bad guys managed to uninstall them by building their custom malware.

The internet is quickly evolving with the trusted antivirus software quickly losing their importance. You, therefore, need to exert more caution when surfing on the internet to avoid being the next malware victim.

Here are 4 main reasons Why Antivirus is Not Enough To Prevent Cyber Attack:

1. There is creation of new viruses every day

The current anti-malware software are effective when dealing with known viruses but cannot be relied on when dealing with newly released viruses. To detect a virus and remove the ransomware, the engineers need first to understand how a virus works to program an anti-virus that can match the newly discovered virus.

Unfortunately, before the vendors can tailor an antivirus for the malware, the virus has managed to infect a few organizations. Therefore, it has become overwhelming for the vendors to keep up the pace of the hackers because the bad guys release the viruses every day. The main reason why you should not trust you're the antivirus software is that even the vendors are advising consumers to cease relying on them.

2. Most attacks don't even involve your computer

The social media is the new field that hackers are using infect your personal computer. Therefore, even if the antivirus vendors found a way to detect all the new viruses released, there is still another loophole.

It started as early as 2007 when a variety of social media platforms such Twitter and Pinterest were hacked. These attacks go beyond your personal computer to your social media profile in order to send spam links to malign websites.

It will also raise your eyebrows to realize that even the cloud-based accounts have the same set of concerns. The hackers have even gone beyond the social media platforms to cloud computing accounts where they steal valuable data. However, you can store your data in cloud provider with robust defenses enough to ward off the attempts by the bad guys.

3. No user Action is Required

A few years ago, you could safely avoid the hackers by avoiding suspicious links and malicious websites. People would even scan every file the downloaded from the web before opening it just to be on the same side.

This is a past strategy, thanks to the online advertising. Nowadays, online malicious advertising colloquially known as malvertising attacks make use of legitimate websites that you can trust and unknowingly pull their malicious content which they use to install malware on your personal computer.

These downloads have proved to be extremely dangerous because a PC will just get infected by visiting a trusted site at an unfortunate moment. The bad guys get away with this by simply inserting their malevolent ads between the legitimate ones.

4. Targeted attacks can easily bypass blacklisting

The traditional antivirus security uses blacklisting to identify bad files and stop them. However, the advanced threats can manage to stay undetected in the system for a long time allowing them to accomplish their goal. They manage to steal passwords and even gain access to other systems.

Conclusion

Honestly, it's impossible to completely detect all the viruses, but you can take some precautions to prevent any probable infections.

One of the things to do is to update your system often to reduce the spectrum of attacks. Whenever you patch management sends you notifications of an update, you should just update the system because the version can deal with some attacks.