If your endpoint security strategy still relies on traditional signature-based antivirus, you are vulnerable. This is not an opinion - it is math. Malware labs produce hundreds of thousands of new variants per day. Traditional antivirus detects them only after someone has cataloged them and distributed the signature - which means for the first hours (or days) you are exposed. The difference between EDR and traditional antivirus is not just technological - it is conceptual.
Why antivirus is not enough
Modern malware uses techniques that antivirus cannot detect: fileless malware that lives only in memory and never touches disk, LOLBins (Living Off the Land Binaries) that use legitimate OS tools for malicious activity, polymorphic malware that changes its own code at every execution, and supply chain attacks arriving through legitimate software updates. A signature-based antivirus is blind to all of this.
EDR: the evolutionary response
An EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) works in a fundamentally different way. Instead of comparing files against a signature database, it monitors behavior: a process enumerating credentials in memory (Mimikatz-like), PowerShell downloading and executing code from the network, an anomalous child process of an Office application, lateral movement via WMI or PsExec. My stack uses Velociraptor as EDR - and the combination with Wazuh for centralized correlation is the real strength.
The transition for an SME does not have to be traumatic. Phase 1: deploy an EDR in monitoring mode alongside existing antivirus. Phase 2: after a month of tuning (reduce false positives), activate response capabilities. Phase 3: remove traditional antivirus. The cost of an open source EDR like Velociraptor is zero for licenses - the real cost is in the expertise to manage it. But it is an investment worth every cent.
If you want to dive deeper into this topic or need specialized consulting, let us talk.
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