Security holes as gateways
Besides phishing sites, the majority of attacks from the Internet take place via drive-by infections. Primed websites first spy on the computer’s configuration for attackable applications, such as add-ons in your browser. If a suitable hole is discovered, a matching exploit is sent to the computer. As with personalised advertising, this is precisely tailored. The malicious code exploits the security hole so it can download and execute additional malware in the future – ransomware or banking Trojans, for example.
What does G DATA do about this? We offer protection against exploits via internally developed technology. The main thing to understand is that numerous small processes run consecutively in a program. Each process reacts to the one before, and so on.
Exploits are data that provoke erroneous reactions in this sequence. The program then runs differently than it actually should do. To detect this, Exploit Protection runs memory tests and checks the runtimes of the individual program sequences. This means it can safeguard your computer from even previously unknown exploits.