The purpose of this article is to share the top 10 differences between EDR and antivirus solutions. EDR solutions have gained a lot of prominence in the market. But there are still a lot of organizations who have yet to delve into the solution. Part of the difference for this is that many are still under the assumption that their antivirus solution provides enough coverage for them. They are not aware what EDR solutions provide above and beyond the tradition antivirus or endpoint protection platform.
Marketing sometimes tends to blur the lines between what products do. There are many people out there that are unaware what differentiates an EDR solution from antivirus and endpoint protection platforms. The top 10 EDR solutions on the market today have a much different technology stack than traditional antivirus solutions. This list will provide a comprehensive high-level overview of 10 things different about an EDR solution over antivirus.
Top 10 Differences Between EDR and Antivirus
- EDR has the ability to use forensics to look at behaviors that have happened post infection (e.g. operating system processes that were modified post-infection.
- EDR solutions record behavior on endpoints, detects suspicious behavioral patterns using data analytics, block threats, and helps security analysts restore compromised systems.
- You can search for processes, events, and indicators across all your endpoints. This is used to hunt threat activity in your environment.
- EDR solutions record events and keep track of logs so analysts can go back to find out how an attacker may have entered the endpoint, where they went, and what they accessed.
- You can use EDR solutions to create YARA rules, which is a way of pattern-matching a piece of malware and searching for evidence of it across your environment. Once a pattern has been discovered, a YARA rule can take action upon it.
- The goal of an antivirus solution is to quarantine and remove malware. This is a different goal from an EDR solution. An EDR solution’s goal is to minimize the dwell time an attacker is in the environment.
- The endpoint agents of an EDR solution have more functions than an antivirus agent. EDR agents provide real-time continuous monitoring, endpoint data collection, signature-less detection, and rule-based automated responses in real-time.
- EDR solutions collect information about network connections, process executions, registry modifications, currently running processes, and cross process events.
- An EDR solution can answer questions like:
- How did the attacker enter the endpoint?
- What was done by the attacker?
- Where did the attacker navigate to?
- What did the attacker access?
- Are there known vulnerabilities on any corporate-owned devices?
- Which devices have unknown services or unauthorized browser extensions?
- Are processes trying to make a network connection on non-standard ports?
- Artifacts discovered can be used for threat hunting and finding advanced persistent threats.