What is Endpoint Security?
Endpoint security, or endpoint protection, is the cybersecurity approach to defending endpoints – such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices – from malicious activity.
According to Gartner, an endpoint protection platform (EPP) is a solution used to “prevent file-based malware attacks, detect malicious activity, and provide the investigation and remediation capabilities needed to respond to dynamic security incidents and alerts.”
What’s considered an endpoint?
An endpoint is any device that connects to the corporate network from outside its firewall. Examples of endpoint devices include:
- Laptops
- Tablets
- mobile devices
- Internet of things (IoT) devices
- Point-of-sale (POS) systems
- Switches
- Digital printers
- Other devices that communicate with the central network
Why Endpoint Security is Important
An endpoint security strategy is essential because every remote endpoint can be the entry point for an attack, and the number of endpoints is only increasing with the rapid pandemic-related shift to remote work. According to a Gallup Poll, a majority of US workers were remote in 2020, with 51% still remote in April of 2021. The risks posed by endpoints and their sensitive data are a challenge that’s not going away.
The endpoint landscape is constantly changing, and businesses of all sizes are attractive targets for cyberattacks. This is common knowledge, even among small businesses. According to a study conducted by Connectwise in 2020, 77% of 700 SMB decision makers surveyed worry they will be the target of an attack in the next six months.
Last year, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, they received an increase of 300,000 complaints over 2019, with reported losses over $4.2 billion. The Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report found “Servers are still dominating the asset landscape due to the prevalence of web apps and mail services involved in incidents. And as social attacks continue to compromise people (they have now pulled past user devices), we begin to see the domination of phishing emails and websites delivering malware used for fraud or espionage.”
Each data breach, costs on average $3.86 million globally with the United States averaging at $8.65 million per data breach according to Ponemon’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020” (Commissioned by IBM). The study identified the biggest financial impact of a breach was “lost business,” making up almost 40% of the data breach average cost.
Protecting against endpoint attacks is challenging because endpoints exist where humans and machines intersect. Businesses struggle to protect their systems without interfering with the legitimate activities of their employees. And while technological solutions can be highly effective, the chances of an employee succumbing to a social engineering attack can be mitigated but never entirely prevented.
How Endpoint Protection Works
The terms endpoint protection, endpoint protection platforms (EPP), and endpoint security are all used interchangeably to describe the centrally managed security solutions that organizations leverage to protect endpoints like servers, workstations, mobile devices, and workloads from cybersecurity threats. Endpoint protection solutions work by examining files, processes, and system activity for suspicious or malicious indicators.
Endpoint protection solutions offer a centralized management console from which administrators can connect to their enterprise network to monitor, protect, investigate and respond to incidents. This is accomplished by leveraging either an on-premise, hybrid, or cloud approach.
The “Traditional or legacy” approach is often used to describe on-premise security posture that is reliant on a locally hosted data center from which security is delivered. The data center acts as the hub for the management console to reach out to the endpoints through an agent to provide security. The hub and spoke model can create security silos since administrators can typically only manage endpoints within their perimeter.
With the pandemic-driven work from home shift, many organizations have pivoted to laptops and bring your own device (BYOD) instead of desktop devices. This along with the globalization of workforces, highlights the limitations of the on-premise approach. Some endpoint protection solution vendors have in recent years shifted to a “Hybrid” approach, taking a legacy architecture design, and retrofitting it for the cloud to gain some cloud capabilities.
The third approach is a “Cloud-native” solution built in and for the cloud. Administrators can remotely monitor and manage endpoints through a centralized management console that lives in the cloud and connects to devices remotely through an agent on the endpoint.The agent can work with or independently to provide security for the endpoint should it not have internet connectivity. These solutions leverage cloud controls and policies to maximize security performance beyond the traditional perimeter removing silos and expanding administrator reach.
Endpoint Protection Software vs. Antivirus Software
Endpoint security software protects endpoints from being breached – no matter if they are physical or virtual, on- or off-premise, in data centers or in the Cloud. It is installed on laptops, desktops, servers, virtual machines, as well as remote endpoints themselves.
Antivirus is often part of an endpoint security solution and is generally regarded as one of the more basic forms of endpoint protection. Instead of using advanced techniques and practices, such as threat hunting and endpoint detection and response (EDR), antivirus simply finds and removes known viruses and other types of malware . Traditional antivirus runs in the background, periodically scanning a device’s content for patterns that match a database of virus signatures. Antivirus is installed on individual devices inside and outside the firewall.
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*Information in this post was gathered from a Crowdstrike article; to view it, click here.