Like many organizations, you’re likely facing the challenge of defending a constantly expanding attack surface—the various entry points through which attackers can infiltrate your network and compromise sensitive data. Over the past decade, the average attack surface has significantly grown as the number of devices connecting to company networks has rapidly increased:
- Laptops, desktops, and mobile devices (company-issued and employees’ personal devices)
- Routers and Wi-Fi access points
- POS systems
- IoT devices
These are all potential entry points into the corporate network, or endpoints. According to the SANS Endpoint Protection and Response Survey, 44 percent of IT teams manage between 5,000 and 500,000 endpoints.
The sheer number of devices virtually guarantees some percentage of them will harbor OS and application vulnerabilities at any given time. While antimalware protection has evolved to a point where it can catch most malicious threats, it can’t stop everything. Fileless malware, for example, is a newer threat that can appear as a normally running process in the computer’s memory, thus avoiding malware signature scanners. The importance of comprehensive endpoint security cannot be overlooked.
Beyond Network Security
On the surface, it may seem that network security adequately encompasses endpoint security, but that’s a costly assumption. The key difference is endpoint security is focused strictly on protecting devices while network security is broadly focused on the entire network. Both are essential to an organization but if endpoint security isn’t a priority for you, devastating threats could easily be overlooked.
Protecting your business from threats is much like securing your home with strong locks and an alarm system. Just as you wouldn’t leave your home unlocked when you’re away or asleep, your organization needs to stay vigilant. A comprehensive, 24/7 security strategy ensures that threats are kept out, or swiftly detected and eliminated if they manage to breach your defenses.
Companies of all sizes usually are subject to some form of compliance and privacy regulation, meaning endpoint security is a necessary step beyond basic network security to proficiently protect your data and reputation. It’s no surprise that your customers expect their data to be secure and are putting deep trust that you will take all precautions to protect it from bad actors. Endpoint security can complete the ring of comprehensive security to save the day without your customers even knowing the day needed to be saved.
Endpoint Security for a Changing Landscape
COVID-19 radically shifted most facets of daily life around the world, and it could be argued that no area was more affected than the workplace. According to a Gallup poll, “On average, from October 2020 to April 2021, at least eight in 10 workers in four occupation categories have been working remotely,” and that trend doesn’t appear to be changing in 2021. With this dramatic increase in remote endpoints, more vulnerabilities have been created with an even greater need for companies and employees to be on guard for threats.
The vulnerability of remote endpoints became strikingly clear in the FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report, which showed an increase of 300,000 complaints of suspected internet crimes compared to 2019, with reported losses exceeding $4.2 billion. If the potential for security breaches isn’t reason enough to secure your endpoints, the financial impact certainly should be. Cybercriminals are constantly looking for ways to infiltrate every possible access point — don’t make it easier by leaving your system’s doors and windows unlocked and unguarded. Some of the most common threats targeting endpoints include:
- Malware
- Ransomware
- Phishing
- Unpatched Software Vulnerabilities
Protect Your Endpoints, Protect Your Business!
With dangers lurking around every technological corner, the good news is there are a multitude of tools and solutions to protect your endpoints, data, customers, and reputation:
| Antivirus Solutions | Endpoint Detection Response (EDR) | Managed Detection and Response (MDR) | URL Filtering | Application Control |
| Anti–malware capabilities, antivirus software. Installed directly onto endpoints but can be limited in defending against more advanced cyber threats. Consider adding another line of defense in addition to antivirus solutions. | Software that focuses on the detection of and response to cybersecurity threats on the endpoint. | A service that continuously monitors, prioritizes, and responds to cybersecurity threats with humans behind the wheel. MDR is augmented with EDR solutions by empowering analysts with data and abilities to act on the endpoint. | Restricts web traffic to trusted websites and prevents users from accessing malicious websites. URL filtering can also prevent dangerous downloads to the network. | Controls permissions, ensuring strict restrictions. Uses whitelisting, blacklisting, and graylisting to prevent malicious applications from running any compromised applications. |
| Network Access Control | Browser Isolation | Cloud Perimeter Security | Endpoint Encryption | Security Email Gateway |
| Overlaps with identity and access management. Secures access to network nodes and determines what devices and users can access the network infrastructure. | Executes browsing sessions in isolated environments where it can’t reach valuable digital assets. Activity remains restricted to isolated environments and web browser codes are destroyed at the end of the session. | A protective perimeter around the cloud environments and databases. Enables you to harden the cloud infrastructure against incoming threats. | Prevents issues such as data leaks via data transfer. | Monitors incoming and outgoing messages for suspicious behavior, preventing them from being delivered. Can be deployed to prevent phishing attacks. |
| Sandboxing | Employee Awareness Training | Patch management | Assessments | Staff Training |
| Isolated and secure digital environment that perfectly replicates the typical end-user operating system. Can contain potential threats for observation and help contain zero-day threats. | Organizations that perform regular awareness training are better suited to detect phishing attacks prevent malware infections. | Push multiple systems within the company to stay in sync with the most recent software versions. | Detect unpatched vulnerabilities by conducting penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and source code reviews. | Educate staff on using blockers and the dangers of various company-approved add-ons. |
| Update Software | Eliminate Unnecessary Software | Ad Blocker | Host-based Firewall | |
| Ensures protection against the vulnerably permitted drive-by-downloads. | Remove software that is no longer supported. improves endpoint security and can prevent potential attacks. | Ensure users are protected from redirection to sites that host drive-by-type malware. | Detect malicious links where infections reside and block users from accessing the sites. |
MDR for Maximum EDR Effectiveness
Gartner Research has found that information security and risk management end-user spending is estimated to “grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.7% from 2018 through 2023 to reach $188.8 billion in constant currency.” This spending directly reflects the fact that threats against businesses are mounting.
Some IT teams focus solely on network security solutions while neglecting their endpoints or leaving their protection to simple anti-virus solutions. As remote employees and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies continue to become increasingly common, endpoint security is more critical than ever.
EDR customers may start with simple antivirus to cover their endpoints but as they grow, they need another solution to address gaps — especially from migrating to the cloud. For these customers that already have EDR, adding MDR gives them the ability to address security and resource gaps in an efficient and cost–effective way.
[Related Reading: MDR vs. EDR: How They Compare and Interact]
RiskIQ’s 2020 Evil Internet Minute security intelligence report revealed that every endpoint connected to the internet faces 1.5 attacks per minute. IT teams should ensure that security monitoring detects end-user attacks and supplement traditional anti-virus with next-generation malware solutions and file integrity monitoring (FIM). By leveraging the principals of network security monitoring coupled with detection and prevention solutions, like EDR, MDR providers can offer posture hardening services and expand their threat coverage from network to endpoint detection and response.
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