Tag Archive for: endpoint security

How to Improve Endpoint Security to Protect Organizations Against Advanced Cyberattacks

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Immature security practices make endpoints an easy target in advanced cyberattacks. Security and risk management leaders should follow this guidance to evaluate their current endpoint protection and develop a prioritized roadmap to improve the resilience of their endpoints.

Cyberattacks have become more sophisticated, with threat actors using fileless attacks and identity theft to gain a foothold in the environment. However, not all organizations face the same level of business risk or start from the same baseline of endpoint protection. According to the 2021 Gartner Global Security and Risk Management Governance Survey, roughly half (48%) of the surveyed organizations struggle to find and hire cybersecurity professionals.

Obsolete practices, like relying primarily on preventive controls, such as signature-based antivirus tools, have left many organizations vulnerable to attacks. Prevention alone is not enough. A step up to continual vulnerability assessment (VA), endpoint security tuning, and detection and response are needed to strengthen the endpoint security posture. These capabilities will require increased focus on the expertise, procedures and availability of internal staff to operate these tools.

Every successful attack causes one or several issues to the business, such as disruption and damage to the organization’s reputation, financial loss, critical data loss and subsequent attacks. Regulatory issues may also occur if the data stolen contains information from customers, vendors or third parties.

How can we improve endpoint protection to mitigate these attacks? This research describes the roadmap to enhance endpoint security using five security levels, each containing the respective projects designed to secure an organization against advanced cyberattacks. Accordingly, SRM leaders responsible for endpoint security must:

  • Evaluate the risks to their organization.
  • Assess the attacker’s landscape.
  • Develop a prioritized roadmap to achieve better protection and reduce the endpoint attack surface.

To learn more about securing endpoints from cyberattacks, please click here to continue reading.

Best Practices for Endpoint Security

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In today’s highly technical world, endpoint devices are everywhere. Endpoint devices, such as employee workstations, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, connect to and communicate with an organization’s network. Because they are intertwined within an organization, it often only takes successfully exploiting one endpoint for threat actors to carve a path through an organization’s network to cause harm.

Studies show that 61 percent of businesses have 1,000 or more endpoints users on their networks. They are a critical part of daily business and are also targets to a wide range of cyberthreats, which is why endpoint security should be a priority for all organizations.

As often is with cybersecurity, the best defense of endpoints is a good offense. But where do you start? We’ve put together a guide for endpoint security best practices so you can better prepare your organization.

Why Prioritize Endpoint Security?

If you think of endpoints as entryways into your network, it’s clear that securing every endpoint against malicious actors is important or you could be leaving the back – or even front – door open to cybercriminals.

For those organizations offering flexible work options, the increase in mobile working and remote employees introduces greater security risks to endpoints. As users connect your company’s network and access business resources from off-premises devices or in the cloud, traditional network perimeter controls are no longer sufficient to protect your company’s information.

A recent study found that 68 percent of surveyed companies experienced one or more endpoint attacks that successfully compromised data and/or IT infrastructure. Cybercriminals and nation-states carry out increasingly sophisticated attacks on endpoints to:

  • Access valuable assets, including trade secrets or intellectual property
  • Exfiltrate data
  • Disrupt important services

The financial and reputational impacts of cyberattacks make it imperative for companies to take a comprehensive approach to endpoint security and use effective measures that combat modern cyberthreats.

While there are many different threats to endpoints, both internal and external, here are some of the most common:

  • Ransomware/Malware
  • Unpatched Vulnerabilities
  • Fileless Attacks
  • Compromised User Accounts

Following some endpoint security best practices puts the foundations in place to protect your networks from the range of cyber threats that inundate companies daily. These include:

  • Consistent Updates
  • Endpoint Security Tools
  • Employee Awareness
  • Detection and Response

Download the full Securing the Endpoint Guide below

Download the Endpoint Guide