Every day, threat actors across the globe come up with an astonishing number of new malware strains – a volume estimated in the hundreds of thousands – and they also come up with increasingly creative & effective ways to hide that malware within common file types that we regularly use for legitimate purposes. If our scanning service is bypassed even once by a cleverly crafted password-protected file or an encrypted zip archive, the results can be disastrous, leaving us struggling to pick of the pieces from a devastating cyberattack.

Thankfully, however, when we combine shrewd content restrictions with our regular malware detection processes, we can establish a new level of control over the content that enters and leaves our system. Instead of relying exclusively on the analysis of threat signatures and suspicious file behaviors, we can categorically block file types that we know we don’t want to deal with in any capacity. We can simply remove password-protected files, executable files, scripts, and other vulnerable, commonly exploited entities from our workflow, and we can even go as far as to whitelist the files we do want to accept and block everything else entirely. We can accomplish all of this by rigorously verifying file contents against the file extension they present – a process which simultaneously blocks targeted file types and uncovers invalid file types with spoofed extensions.

The advanced iteration of the Cloudmersive Virus Scan API provides powerful 360-degree content protection, combining cutting-edge malware scanning and in-depth content verification into one simple, high-speed scanning process with unprecedented customization options. Whether we’re using Cloudmersive Storage Protect to scan our AWS, Azure, SharePoint & GCP storage locations, or using Cloudmersive Shield to safeguard our forward and reverse network proxies, we can depend on powerful content protection without writing a single line of code.