Why endpoint security matters

In today's digital era marred by a string of cyber attacks, cyber criminals are using the latest tools and techniques to orchestrate a number of crimes that not only cause financial losses to businesses but also obliterate the digital lives of the affected users.

Endpoint security is gaining attention

As a result of rising malicious attacks targeting end users, businesses are increasingly looking to fortify endpoint security. The term endpoint security refers to securing the endpoints—access points of a business network—and end-user devices including desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. With the trend of BYOD (bring your own device) becoming popular, endpoint security is becoming central to an organization's overall security strategy.

Other sophisticated techniques such as spear-phishing, spyware, evasion tools, commonly called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) are also on the rise. These threats are malicious and are usually designed to gain undetected access to sensitive business information. These complex threats are increasingly becoming a big headache for businesses of all sizes. In order to protect themselves from these threats, organizations need solutions such as application control and whitelisting that can mitigate the effects of APTs.

Leverage AI and ML

In addition to the existing endpoint security solutions and the traditional engines they routinely use for malware detection, organizations can enhance their security postures by using next-gen endpoint protection mechanisms that leverage machine learning (ML, static analysis, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning. This can help protect organizations with exploit prevention, ransomware protection, behavior monitoring and anti-hacker technologies.

There are a number of security solutions available on the market that allow organizations to run alerts whenever they detect suspicious activity or when viruses, spyware and other malicious software tries to compromise a network or device. These solutions are capable of taking remedial action for low to medium threats. For, more severe threats, however, they initiate automatic removal of malicious software in order to prevent infection. Organizations can evaluate these solutions per their business needs.

EDR capabilities

Organizations can also consider deploying endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities in order to collect and correlate security events from multiple sources including firewalls, endpoints, and servers. This will enable organizations to quickly detect and remediate threats in addition to getting insights into evolving threats and hacker activity. These next-gen protection systems also enable organizations to do a root cause analysis to ascertain the impact of a security incident and learn ways to prevent them.

The article has been written by Neetu Katyal, Content and Marketing Consultant

She can be reached on LinkedIn.