Why is Endpoint Security Increasingly Important?

Historically, securing your business meant protecting the network perimeter. Though you still needed some basics, like antivirus on your endpoints, the focus on network-based defenses did a decent job of keeping your organization secure. Most of your data and endpoints were located inside a corporate perimeter so you could keep them fairly safe by surrounding your sensitive assets with security technologies like firewalls and network IDS/IPS. With so much investment in the network, threat actors evolved and began going directly after the endpoint - desktops, laptops and servers.

As business and workforce needs evolved, data began moving into the cloud with Microsoft 365 and other tools, while more end users began routinely working from home, coffee shops, the airport and other locations outside the protected corporate network. Operating Systems and business critical software applications require frequent updates and security patches that are challenging for the typical IT team to keep up with. Thus, even well-known vulnerabilities that were patched by the software vendor years ago often remained unpatched, providing more gaps for attackers to leverage. The corporate perimeter has essentially dissolved and endpoints are both the new perimeter and the weakest link, making strong endpoint security an important way to reduce risk.

Endpoints are one of the biggest targets for cyber criminals because these devices are especially vulnerable to various attacks, including phishing and ransomware. Well-known websites that are considered to be reputable have been compromised so even advanced Antivirus and the most diligent end users are only marginally effective at stopping cyberthreats. Criminals often use endpoint devices as entry points to access corporate networks, leveraging existing software vulnerabilities to steal data or hold information hostage. So, in addition to threat prevention, endpoint security tools that gather telemetry to enhance visibility can help you detect and respond more effectively, even to advanced threats that often use no malware.

Enhanced Visibility via Endpoint Detection and Response

Endpoints are targeted by threat actors because they provide a path into corporate resources and access to critical information. A growing remote workforce combined with a shortage of skilled security professionals makes endpoints easier to reach and exploit. Because of this, protecting the endpoint from cyberthreats should be a top priority and has the added benefit of increasing visibility across your organization to identify more threats faster. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is an important security tool because it gathers security specific telemetry that’s not available from native device logs or other security tools.

The Importance of Visibility

While threat prevention is critical, nothing stops all cyberthreats, so you need a technology that shifts your endpoints from a security risk to a source of security intelligence. EDR technology provides visibility into threats that slip past other security technologies, especially when correlated with security telemetry from network and cloud security tools.

EDR focuses on providing the visibility you need to detect, investigate and mitigate potential threats. The goal is to find threat actors that may be quietly resident on your endpoints and get the detailed information you need to evict them and keep them out. Unlike native OS or device logs, EDR technology gathers telemetry specifically designed to identify cyberthreats, even those that use no malware. The goal of enhanced visibility via EDR is to reduce the time to detect and effort to respond to cyberattacks so your security team has more time for initiatives that help grow your business.

While EDR technology helps illuminate blind spots, it requires trained security analysts to interpret the output and take action. For example, if an intruder breaks a window or picks a door lock, your home security system will ring an alarm, alerting you of the potentially dangerous situation. Someone must still validate the threat to ensure the alert wasn’t just a neighbor’s cat tripping your security camera motion detectors. EDR provides the earliest possible warning that an endpoint device may have been compromised, but just like a great home security system you need experts to understand the data so you can respond appropriately and effectively.

Endpoint security is important, but it is only one piece of a robust security program. Ideally endpoint security should be part of a holistic approach to security. Once you have individual security products in place, you can get more value from those tools by expanding visibility across endpoint, network and cloud via Extended Detection and Response (XDR) technology. Some XDR solutions include endpoint, network, and cloud security products to help you quickly fill gaps in your security program. Whether you have the point security products in place or have gaps to fill, unifying multiple security tools to better identify advanced threats and combining that with incident response and threat intelligence is where XDR shines.

XDR can help take data and alerts from a wide range of unconnected security point products and correlate that information into a single view. At its best, XDR technology is cloud-native and includes strong and continuously updated threat intelligence to provide context that helps differentiate alerts that should be investigated from low priority noise.

The goal of XDR technology is to reduce the risk to your organization while helping your SOC and skilled analysts be more effective. XDR typically leverages machine learning, AI and automation to quickly accomplish process-driven tasks that would take a lot of analyst time. This allows your skilled analysts to focus on more impactful activities. As a side benefit, you may be able to keep skilled analysts longer by giving them time to work on more interesting parts of their job. If you don’t have a SOC or enough skilled analysts, you can find a managed XDR solution to boost your security posture and allow your analysts to work on high priority investigation and response activities as well as projects to help your business grow.

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