Stronger Endpoint Security: Four Trends to Consider When Improving Your Defenses,Stronger Endpoint Security: Four Trends to Consider When Improving Your Defenses

Security teams in many organizations focus much of their attention, manpower and resources on network security; however, this approach often neglects the primary point of entry and most vulnerable systems to any attack – endpoints.

Good endpoint security is key to business success. When it comes to securing the endpoint, consideration of the following four emerging trends can impact how security teams best formulate their overall strategy for endpoint protection:

• The number of endpoint devices continues to grow: Almost all employees use an increasing number of their own devices for both personal and professional activity. Security teams often have limited visibility into these devices, and those devices often lack fundamental security protections. The growth of the endpoint attack surface means that there is an ever-greater risk of enterprise data being compromised.
• An insufficient application of machine-to-machine protection: Machine-to-machine activity increases the available threat surface. It also tends to have less direct protection due to limited capacity and unique use characteristics. This makes it more difficult for security teams to monitor and detect unauthorized activity between non-user endpoint systems.
• Misconfigurations and employee mistakes continue to contribute to breaches: Regardless of security systems, all it takes is one busy employee to click on a spear phishing email for an attacker to have successfully unleashed a targeted attack. Training employees to look for telltale signs of spear phishing emails and other targeted threats can help reduce organizational risk.
• The number of IT security professionals continues to fall behind demand: Many attackers can fairly easily bypass basic security measures such as antivirus, so organizations need stronger security solutions. Additionally, organizations will need to overcome the talent shortage facing the industry and find IT security professionals to continually monitor and proactively investigate endpoints for suspicious activity.

Protecting and defending every endpoint in a network is a significant challenge for organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

One rapidly growing area of endpoint protection is endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions. The main purpose is to increase visibility into endpoint status and events to improve threat detection and response times. EDR solutions have recently added features to actively block threats, enable machine-learning algorithms to detect threats and malicious activity, monitor privileged accounts for suspect behavior and much more. 

Click here for more information on how best to defend the endpoint.