Cylance explains why math beats malware

I’ll let you in on a little secret. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Many security experts don’t use any antimalware tools[/inlinetweet]. They simply know how to recognize and avoid potential threats. Meanwhile, many users who have antimalware protection installed and kept up to date still manage to get infected or compromised. Why is that?

Cylance was essentially borne from that question, and the answer that Stuart McClure and the Cylance team came up with is to use math and machine learning to enable the computer to become its own security expert. Using mathematical algorithms allows the computer to recognize and avoid threats without relying on signatures of known threats.

Here is an excerpt from Math vs. Malware–a white paper from Cylance:

In order to keep up with modern attackers, security technologies need to evolve alongside them–without relying on human intervention. That’s where [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]math and machine learning have the advantage[/inlinetweet]. If we can objectively classify “good” files from “bad” based on mathematical risk factors, then we can teach a machine to make the appropriate decisions on these files in real time.

In the pages that follow, we posit that a math and machine learning approach to computer security will fundamentally change the way we understand, categorize, and control execution of every file. We’ll also discuss how Cylance products leverage this approach, and demonstrate just how different they are from every other security offering on the market.

For years industries such as healthcare, insurance, and high-frequency trading have applied the principles of machine learning to analyze enormous quantities of business data and drive autonomous decision-making. At the core of each implementation is a massively scalable data-processing “brain” capable of applying highly tuned mathematical models to enormous amounts of data in near real-time.

Learn more about why math is the key to superior malware defense, and how Cylance is using math to defeat malware in this white paper: Math vs. Malware.