In today’s digital age, basic antimalware protection is common, however, deploying full layered protection is not. Between daily headlines with data breaches, and our recent experience in promoting migration from Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 to 12.1, we know many customers are overlooking the full protection they’re entitled to.
The year SEP 11 was released (2007) about 700,000 unique malware variants were discovered. In 2011, the year Endpoint Protection 12.1.x was released, that number had increased to 400,000,000. As the threat landscape continues to evolve and change, the number of newly discovered variants will continue to increase. Miscreants of the underground have found new forms and disguises to compromise the security of their targets.
On January 5th, 2015; SEP 11.0.x and SEP Small Business Edition 12.0 reached End-of-Support-Life (EOSL) and are no longer entitled to support, LiveUpdate, virus definitions or security updates. Customers who have not migrated to Endpoint Protection 12.1.x should reference the “Best practices for upgrading to the latest version of Endpoint Protection 12.1” KB http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH163700. Customer experiencing issues during the migration process should open up a support case under “SEP 11 Migration”.
Traditional anti-virus requires Symantec to have a submission of the threat in order to build signature based detections. Signature based detections address the bulk of mass malware, but are always one step behind the bad guys.
It’s time to transition to a better protected world - SEP 12.1 installed and configured to run the full protection stack. SEP 12.1 includes many important new protection technologies that extend our capability to protect and secure our customers:
- Symantec Insight, one of the advanced features of SEP 12.1.x, can detect threats based on files characteristics and reputation scores rather than relying solely on virus definitions.
- Real-Time SONAR replaces TruScan to identify malicious behavior of unknown threats using heuristics and reputation data in real time.
- Download Insight examines files that are downloaded through Web browsers, text messaging clients, and other portals. Download Insight uses reputation information from Symantec Insight to make educated decisions about a file's safety and improve system performance by only scanning at-risk files.
- Insight Lookup can detect malicious zero-day executable files that may not be detected by AutoProtect, and sends information from the files to Symantec for evaluation. Insight Lookup makes malware detection faster and more accurate.
- The Intrusion Prevention policy includes browser intrusion prevention, which uses IPS signatures to detect attacks that are directed at browser vulnerabilities.
It is important to understand the risks of using anti-virus alone and the benefits of the new technologies Symantec products offer. As a trusted security partner, we seek to identify, educate, and assist customers with installing and configuring SEP 12.1 for optimal protection. For more information on best practices for Symantec Endpoint Protection, go to http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH181685.