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Cybercriminals target endpoints — devices like laptops, phones, tablets, and servers that connect to the network. Endpoint security software prevents these points of vulnerability from being breached. Least privilege reduces the threat window by ensuring that benefits are only available for the finite moment when they’re needed (just-in-time privileged access). This also helps to protect against attacks like ransomware.
Prevents Hackers from Accessing Critical Data
Depending on the size of your business, data breaches can cause severe financial losses. Even a single attack could damage your reputation, lose customers, and incur expensive legal fees. And that’s not counting the lost revenue and potential loss of future business from customers who choose to stop doing business with you after learning about your data breaches or stealing their information.
Endpoint security software helps protect your business from unauthorized access to critical data, such as bank account information or customer records. It also prevents phishing attacks from spreading to your employees’ devices and compromising your corporate network. And it blocks hackers from exploiting vulnerabilities in IoT devices like smartwatches, routers, and other connected home or work devices to hijack your business networks.
Threat intelligence integrations enable your endpoint protection solution to quickly learn about new threats and stop them before they cause damage. This is especially important when using a traditional signature-based approach to antivirus/antimalware, which misses 60 percent of all attacks. A cloud-based model to hold threat information eliminates the bloat of keeping massive data databases on each endpoint, making it easier for your team to scale. This also frees up your IT resources for more strategic projects to help grow your business.
Prevents Malware Attacks
Attacks can take many forms, from ransomware that locks up data until you pay a ransom to spells that make your business unusable through denial-of-service attacks. Whatever the attack, endpoint security is the first line of defense against these threats and protects your business.
Choosing the proper endpoint security solution is a crucial decision for your business. The best solutions offer fast and continuous detection, prevention, and response across all your devices. They also provide visibility and protection even when a device is off-network or offline. This is important because the modern workforce includes remote workers and BYOD.
A good endpoint security solution prevents malware by using antimalware and behavior analysis to detect threats. This can identify suspicious files or programs that look different than their signatures and zero-day attacks that have yet to be discovered by traditional antivirus software.
The threat landscape is changing, and attackers are becoming more creative with their attacks. For example, they are now embedding malware in advertisements on reputable websites. This is called malvertising, and it cannot be easy to spot.
Businesses need a robust endpoint security solution that can prevent lateral attacks, which are the majority of cyberattacks today. Most minor privilege policies help by reducing the number of privileged accounts on an endpoint to only those needed. This helps reduce the threat window by condensing how long attackers can move laterally around the network.
Prevents Theft of Data
Endpoint security software helps prevent the theft of data from your business. This can occur in ransomware, phishing, SIM swapping, and more. It protects customer data, business information, and intellectual property from attacks like these. This includes protecting devices that connect to your network, such as mobiles, PCs, and IoT.
Endpoint protection solutions sandbox devices to ensure they are safe before giving them access to the network. They also help businesses reduce how much downtime they experience, which is essential as studies show that it costs a company $100,00 per hour of downtime.
Cyberattacks are growing more sophisticated, making it harder for businesses to protect their networks and endpoints. These include advanced malware, fileless malware/living off-the-land attacks, and zero-day exploits. These are difficult to detect by traditional antivirus and antimalware solutions that use signature-based detection.
Endpoint protection software combines next-generation antivirus (NGAV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR). NGAV solutions have a zero percent false positive rate, allowing them to accurately detect known and unknown threats. EDR solutions collect detailed security data and telemetry to provide threat intelligence, root cause analysis, incident response, and more. They can be deployed in tandem with NGAV or standalone to enhance the effectiveness of your business’s security solution.
Prevents Data Loss
Regardless of the size of your business, cybersecurity is vital. Cyberattacks can cause significant damage to the reputation and bottom line, especially for companies that store customer data. The average cost to recover from a breach is $4 million; some breaches have cost companies tens or even hundreds of millions in damages. Investing in endpoint security software can prevent these costly attacks and protect the integrity of your company’s data. In addition to preventing malware and spyware attacks, endpoint protection also helps you avoid data loss. This can be done by detecting unauthorized downloads or malware infiltrators that could steal files from your network. It can also prevent phishing attacks responsible for many data breaches in 2018. These threats are typically carried out through drive-by downloads when someone visits a website that installs malicious code without the user’s knowledge. Endpoint security software protects many devices, including laptops, tablets, and phones. It can save more complex devices such as industrial control systems, point-of-sale (PoS) machines, ATMs, and network switches. These systems may be connected to a corporate network using TCP/IP or another protocol. Most security solutions can be deployed as SaaS or on centralized servers, allowing cybersecurity professionals to manage all endpoints from one console. They can also include application controls that prevent the use of applications with exploitable vulnerabilities.
