The five must-have considerations of endpoint protection solutions

Ralph Berndt, sales and marketing director of Syrex.

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In today’s connected landscape, there is a growing complexity associated with safeguarding the myriad endpoint devices accessing the corporate network. The unpredictability of attacks and threats are increasing, and threat actors are using increasingly sophisticated technologies to compromise devices.

Adding further impetus to this is the normalisation of a distributed working environment that sees employees using their personal devices to log into back-end systems. Generally, employees at home are often prone to less than cautious behaviour and non-compliance with the corporate cyber security policy. Check Point research has found that 39% of security professionals are no longer confident in their existing endpoint protection, with a further 50% of companies stating they will replace these solutions by 2023. 

But selecting an effective endpoint protection solution has become a complicated undertaking. Here are the five must-haves of any such solution in the digital world.

Anti-phishing

Phishing has become one of the most significant threats facing end-users and businesses today. Phishing attacks use advanced social engineering techniques that can easily trick employees into giving away sensitive information that can be used to either perpetrate identity theft or to commit fraud.

Having anti-phishing capabilities is one of the fundamental considerations when selecting an endpoint protection solution. It must be able to actively prevent the likes of zero-day phishing, impersonation, spear-phishing and business e-mail compromise.

Anti-ransomware

Ransomware can be challenging to combat as companies do not know that they have been infected until it is too late. It can penetrate the organisation through multiple entry points such as the web, e-mail and removable media devices.

When it comes to anti-ransomware capabilities, an endpoint protection solution must be able to defend against zero-day ransomware attacks and include an anti-ransomware engine that monitors changes to files on user drives. This enables the solution to identify ransomware behaviour such as illegitimate file encryption.

Content disarm and reconstruction (CDR)

No business can afford to inspect every e-mail attachment and disrupt productivity. However, they can also not risk users downloading potentially infected files to their devices without screening them first. This requires a security solution that has automatic file sanitation features – CDR.

An effective endpoint protection solution can automatically scan all incoming files to ensure they are safe without disrupting the normal workflow. Furthermore, it can remove exploitable content from documents by sanitising them within seconds.

Anti-bot capabilities

Given their nature, bots present a formidable threat to any organisation. Hackers often use them in advanced persistent threat attacks that see them controlling the bots remotely to execute illegal activities. These bot attacks can result in data theft that can potentially result in companies having to close their doors.

A quality endpoint protection solution can therefore automatically detect and contain bot-driven infections. It can continuously monitor outgoing traffic and identify potential machines that are infected with bot malware.

Automated post-breach detection, remediation and response

Even though traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions can detect suspicious behaviour, they cannot perform automatic remediation. Without this in place, the risk of attack residuals is greater.

Therefore, an endpoint protection solution that can automatically analyse, contextualise and remediate incidents is worth its weight in gold. It must automatically determine if an event was an attack, how the hacker got in, what the impact has been and how the systems must be cleaned.

Join me next time as I discuss the five principles behind selecting an optimal endpoint protection solution.