Enterprise endpoints (laptops, workstations, servers, mailboxes, etc.) have historically been a primary vector of cyberattacks that led to major security incidents and breaches. The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report testifies that user devices were involved in 30% and servers – in 63% of data breaches. Ponemon Institute’s 2020 “Study on the State of Endpoint Security Risk” covering 671 IT security professionals reports that 68% of organizations suffered “an endpoint attack that compromised data assets and/or IT infrastructure in the last 2 years.”
In addition to being prevalent, endpoint-related breaches are extremely costly. The Ponemon Institute study estimates the average cost per breach resulting from an attack on endpoints to be $8.94 million (a 26% increase from $7.12 million the previous year), which is 2.3 times higher than the $3.92 million average cost of a general data breach (as reported by IBM’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report).
With the world tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and most knowledge workers operating remotely, risk from endpoints has further increased. First, most end-user devices now live outside of corporate firewalls, radically expanding the attack surface. Second, malicious activity exploiting the pandemic has drastically increased with phishing and malware-laced emails (e.g., touting “government” announcements on the pandemic), malicious web sites (e.g., with COVID-19 maps), and other bait for the unwary. As a result, endpoint security’s role in defending an organization’s assets and data has become of paramount importance.
Deploying Endpoint Detection and Response solutions (EDR) alongside Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) has become a best practice in endpoint security. In the report “Critical Capabilities for Endpoint Protection Platforms,” industry-analysis firm Gartner states that “prevention is still the primary goal of EPP solutions; however, prevention is no longer enough. Evasive threats require fast and effective attack detection and response capabilities.” At the same time, EDR “solution complexity and attack complexity are driving an increased need for incident response support and skilled administrators.”
Consequently, EDR adoption has been higher among large enterprises with well-resourced Security Operations Centers (SOC) or businesses with enough funding to outsource endpoint security to a managed detection and response (MDR) service provider. Organizations with lower security budgets, expertise, and levels of staffing, however, often rely on traditional EPP alone. The Ponemon Institute survey proves the point: 64% of respondents’ employers don’t have EDR due to a lack of budget or staff to support it, among other reasons. What makes things worse is that “51% of respondents say their organizations are ineffective at surfacing threats because their endpoint security solutions are not effective at detecting advanced attacks” and estimate that their anti-virus misses 60% of threats.
To summarize, the current state of endpoint security is that attacks are prolific and costly, yet many organizations are not equipped to defend against them – they don’t use EDR and their EPP solutions miss the mark. So, what are they to do? Bitdefender recommends opting for stronger prevention enhanced with technologies to reinforce security posture: harden defenses, reduce risk, and uncover the threat landscape. Specifically, organizations should:
To provide organizations the capabilities needed to implement this framework in a single package, Bitdefender has created GravityZone Elite - an integrated next-generation endpoint protection, risk management, and attack forensics platform for all types of endpoints and email. GravityZone Elite uniquely delivers:
Watch the webinar “Re-Imagine Endpoint Security” to learn how your organization can defend itself with stronger prevention enhanced with security-posture-reinforcing technologies of GravityZone Elite. See why the time to re-imagine your endpoint protection is now.
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Michael Weinstein is Director of Product Marketing for datacenter- and cloud-security solutions at Bitdefender. During his 20-year career, Michael has led product marketing efforts at leading technology companies such as Wind River (Intel), Honeywell, Polycom, Logitech, and HP. Michael holds an MBA degree from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
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