Fileless malware poses a new threat. Antivirus Demand Increases

Fileless malware poses a new threat. Antivirus Demand Increases

In addition to the variants mentioned, there are also coin miners in the form of fileless malware. This is another big trend from last year. Corresponding programs either only exist in the main memory or are used as small code snippets when visiting infected websites in running processes, such as iexplore.exe or javaw. exe, inserted, or distributed as e-mail attachments and loaded into RAM by the user. 

Virus authors often use Windows Powershell or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Since they do not exist as files in their own right, the antivirus tools struggle to detect them. As a rule, these programs do not survive the next computer restart. Until then, however, they have time to spread over the network, for example.

The new wave of banking Trojans

According to Malware bytes' observation, the number of attacks with banking Trojans has risen sharply. An old friend is primarily responsible for this: Emotet was first discovered in summer 2014 and has been increasingly active again since August. The Trojan is mostly delivered by email and is activated after opening the file attachment, which is actually a packed EXE file, or after the user clicks on a link that leads to an infected website. Emotet then infects the computer's network stack and extracts all account and credit card data from the outbound traffic.

Expert opinion

This year's test was decided by the features of the programs. Because in terms of recognition rates, the differences between the test candidates are not very large. Nobody demands that AV software also optimize the Windows PC, but access protection for important folders as a measure against ransomware should actually be a matter of course.

The overall winner is Protegent Total Security because, besides virus protection, equipment and performance also play a role here.

Protegent can point to the best equipment that leaves almost nothing to be desired. The victory of the Big Companies manufacturer comes as a surprise; however, a bug in the 2019 version of the software reduced the performance. Although the manufacturer has eliminated the error, the lower speed was included in the overall result. 

Two former stars of the scene only end up in the back seats. F-Secure and Symantec should urgently overhaul their engine, and better equipment is also needed.  Secretly, quietly and quietly, the company has continuously optimized its program over the years. The recognition rates are right, and the equipment and performance are also good.