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 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 the 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 of 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 dominance 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 $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 as “lost business,” making up almost 40% of the average cost of a data breach.
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, 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 an 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 if it does 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-premises or off-premises, in data centers or in the cloud. It is installed on laptops, desktops, servers, virtual machines, and 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.
Core Functionality of an Endpoint Protection Solution
Endpoint security tools that provide continuous breach prevention must integrate these fundamental elements:
1. Prevention: NGAV
Traditional antivirus solutions detect less than half of all attacks. They function by comparing malicious signatures, or bits of code, to a database that is updated by contributors whenever a new malware signature is identified. The problem is that malware that has not yet been identified, or unknown malware, is not in the database. There is a gap between the time a piece of malware is released into the world and the time it becomes identifiable by traditional antivirus solutions.
Next-generation antivirus (NGAV) closes that gap by using more advanced endpoint protection technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to identify new malware by examining more elements, such as file hashes, URLs, and IP addresses.
2. Detection: EDR
Prevention is not enough. No defense is perfect, and some attacks will always make it through the defenses and successfully penetrate the network. Conventional security can’t see when this happens, leaving attackers free to dwell in the environment for days, weeks, or months. Businesses need to stop these “silent failures” by finding and removing attackers quickly.
To prevent silent failures, an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution needs to provide continuous and comprehensive visibility into what is happening on endpoints in real time. Businesses should look for solutions that offer advanced threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities, including incident data search and investigation, alert triage, suspicious activity validation, threat hunting, and malicious activity detection and containment.
3. Managed Threat Hunting
Not all attacks can be detected by automation alone. The expertise of security professionals is essential to detecting today’s sophisticated attacks.
Managed threat hunting is conducted by elite teams that learn from incidents that have already occurred, aggregate crowdsourced data, and provide guidance on how best to respond when malicious activity is detected.
4. Threat Intelligence Integration
To stay ahead of attackers, businesses need to understand threats as they evolve. Sophisticated adversaries and advanced persistent threats (APTs) can move quickly and stealthily, and security teams need up-to-date and accurate intelligence to ensure defenses are automatically and precisely tuned.
A threat intelligence integration solution should incorporate automation to investigate all incidents and gain knowledge in minutes, not hours. It should generate custom indicators of compromise (IoCs) directly from the endpoints to enable a proactive defense against future attacks. There should be a human element as well, comprised of expert security researchers, threat analysts, cultural experts, and linguists who can make sense of emerging threats in a variety of contexts.
CrowdStrike’s Advanced Endpoint Protection
Organizations want fast and continuous detection, prevention, and response. That requires unobstructed visibility across all endpoints and the ability to prevent sophisticated attacks in real-time and block persistent attackers from compromising their environments and stealing data.
CrowdStrike offers a new approach to endpoint security. Unlike traditional security or network security solutions, CrowdStrike’s endpoint security solution unifies the technologies required to successfully stop breaches, including true next-gen antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed threat hunting, and threat intelligence automation, delivered via a single lightweight agent. Falcon Enterprise includes the following modules:
- CrowdStrike’s NGAV solution, Falcon Prevent™, has a 100 percent rating for detecting both known and unknown samples of malware with a false positive rate of zero percent. Falcon Prevent is the industry’s first “NGAV Approved” endpoint solutions, as noted by Gartner, Forrester, and other industry analysts.
- Falcon Insight™ EDR collects and inspects event information in real time to prevent and detect attacks on endpoints. Built on CrowdStrike’s cloud-native architecture, Falcon Insight records all activities of interest for deeper inspection, both on the fly and after the fact, so security teams can quickly investigate and respond to incidents that evade standard prevention measures.
- The CrowdStrike® Falcon OverWatch™ team elevates detection beyond automation. With one of the most seasoned teams in the industry and CrowdStrike Threat Graph™, a database that processes over 6 trillion events per week, Falcon Overwatch identifies and stops over 30,000 breach attempts per year. When a threat is discovered, the Overwatch team can take action within seconds.
- CrowdStrike’s CrowdStrike Falcon® Intelligence platform makes predicative security a reality by integrating threat intelligence and endpoint protection. Suitable for businesses of any size, CrowdStrike Falcon® Intelligence provides the ability to instantly analyze any threats that reach an organization’s endpoints. With CROWDSTRIKE FALCON® INTELLIGENCE, organizations finally have the ability to get ahead of adversary activity, and stay ahead.
Interested to see the CrowdStrike Falcon® Platform in action?
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