Summary
CylancePROTECT is no longer available to the SMU community and has been replaced by Microsoft Defender.
OIT is currently testing a new antivirus application called CylancePROTECT. Cylance is a robust and powerful application that blocks virus and malware threats before they take hold. Rather than relying on particular virus definitions, Cylance targets behavioral patterns of threatening applications. Certain applications that are benign yet exhibit some of these behavioral patterns can be whitelisted for the organization at the administrator level. The product is much more effective but does shift some of the oversight responsibility to the IT security administrators.
We have deployed Cylance only to OIT computers to review the behavior and effectiveness of the application. We are releasing Cylance to all Macs over the next few weeks in preparation for the end of our McAfee subscription. Mac users will begin to see the Cylance application on their IT managed computer. It will run initially in monitoring mode only. After the two-week review, we will convert it to blocking mode and then remove McAfee from those systems.
More details regarding the deployment of CylancePROTECT to Windows and Linux computers will be sent later this summer.
