Endpoints play a vital role in any organisation’s operations. However, endpoints are susceptible to a variety of cyber attacks, particularly malware and ransomware – threats that remain highly popular among threat actors. Additionally, many social engineering attacks seek to gain access to individual users’ endpoints.
Worse still, in a time when factors such as remote and hybrid work, bring-your-own endpoints, and endpoint visibility challenges are already making endpoint security difficult, threat actors continue to evolve their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to better target valuable endpoints. Fortunately, endpoint security has also adapted to stay one step ahead.
The latest iteration in this evolution is advanced endpoint protection.
What Is Advanced Endpoint Protection?
Advanced endpoint protection refers to any endpoint security solution, or suite of solutions, that utilises artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and other intelligent automation capabilities to deliver comprehensive endpoint protection from modern cyber threats.
An upgrade from traditional endpoint security technology (such as signature-based antimalware and host-based intrusion prevention), advanced endpoint protection is designed to prevent, detect, and respond to a wide range of threats. These solutions can utilise AI to identify known and unknown threats, protect against fileless malware and zero-day threats, and integrate with other security solutions within an organisation’s security tech stack.
The overall goal of advanced endpoint protection is to provide proactive, intelligent, and adaptive endpoint security at an enterprise level.
Role of Advanced Endpoint Protection in Your Endpoint Security Strategy
Endpoint security is foundational to any organisations’ security strategy.
Endpoints are central to operations, but they can be difficult to secure, given the rise of hybrid work models and user-based perimeters and environments. Threat actors are all too eager to take advantage of this security gap, a motivation fueled by the fact that endpoints hold key data and serve as jumping-off points to the network at large. Considering that 70% of data breaches target the endpoint, according to Verizon, and that ransomware, an (often) endpoint-based attack, remains a top attack type, the endpoint is a crown jewel for security teams and threat actors alike.
Advanced endpoint protection seeks to tip the scales in favor of defenders by enabling proactive and preventative security techniques against threats, instead of consistently reacting to incidents. These solutions allow budget and time constrained internal teams to focus on what matters, respond only to precise, actionable alerts, better manage their endpoint security centrally, and close existing security gaps. And that’s on top of the core capabilities of swift detection and response and the ability to stop previously unknown threats.
While the endpoint is just one part of the increasingly complex cybersecurity puzzle, it should be seen as a corner piece — essential for framing the bigger picture and helping the rest of the security landscape come into focus once it’s fully secured.
Key Features of Advanced Endpoint Protection
Advanced endpoint protection goes far beyond traditional endpoint security capabilities, instead offering comprehensive security designed to meet modern-day threats.
Key features of advanced endpoint protection include:
- Enhanced threat detection
Advanced endpoint protection can identify numerous types of threats, including known malware strains, unknown or zero-day threats, and more sophisticated threats such as fileless malware. - Proactive threat prevention
Prevention is key with advanced endpoint protection, as these solutions can block threats before they execute on a system. Application control, exploit prevention, integrated static and dynamic file analysis, and attack surface reduction are all tactics used to prevent execution. - Automated response
These solutions can take automated actions, including endpoint isolation, the killing of a malicious process, or forensic logging, if a certain threat is detected within the environment. - Integration with endpoint detection and response (EDR)
Advanced endpoint protection solutions can work alongside, or be integrated into EDR solutions, allowing for deeper visibility, threat hunting, root cause analysis, and other key detection and response capabilities. - Improved threat management
Advanced endpoint protection solutions can prioritise, track, and manage threats across all endpoints, typically through centralised dashboards and logs. - Use of ML and AI for behavioral analysis
The use of ML and AI within advanced endpoint protection solutions not only allows for adaptable, constantly improving detections, but also puts behavioural detections and analysis at the forefront, creating more precise detections and other key functions. - Data loss prevention (DLP)
DLP capabilities help prevent the leaking, stealing, or illicit transfer of vital, sensitive data (such as PII) from endpoints. This protects both data integrity and assists with compliance. - Threat intelligence integration
Advanced endpoint protection solutions can pull in real-time threat intelligence feeds, which helps the solution identify new threats faster, enrich alerts with vital context, and improve prevention capabilities based on evolving intelligence.
Advanced Endpoint Protection vs. Next-Gen Antivirus
While next-generation antivirus is often in the same conversation as endpoint security, and plays an important role in modern-day endpoint security, the tool is not the same as advanced endpoint protection. The two differ regarding scope and functionality.
Next-gen antivirus (NGAV) can be a component of advanced endpoint protection, though not always, and is not a replacement for advanced endpoint protection.
While both contain similar capabilities such as behavioural analysis, AI/ML threat detection, and malware detection, endpoint protection is a much broader solution in terms of capabilities, offering a full endpoint security suite. NGAV, on the other hand, is limited in scope, serves primarily as a replacement for traditional antivirus, and is utilised for malware detection.
Benefits of Advanced Endpoint Protection
With threat actors continually pivoting their tactics, developing more advanced malware strains and finding new ways to gain initial access undetected, protecting your organisations’ endpoints is critical to preventing a serious incident. Endpoints not only contain valuable data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), but also serve as gateways to online applications, email accounts, and the network at large. That makes them both a lucrative target and a vital security point. That’s where advanced endpoint protection can make a major difference.
Benefits of deploying and utilising advanced endpoint protection include:
1. Enhanced threat detection and response, including malware detection, zero-day threat prevention, and insider threat detection.
2. Improved security posture that can include a hardened attack surface, centralised visibility and management of endpoints, compliance support, and data loss prevention.
3. Increased automation and efficiency for security teams, stemming from automated responses, increased visibility, and a reduction of false positives or alert noise.
4. A more secure remote workforce due to the securing of endpoints that may exist and be utilised outside of a traditional network perimeter.
These benefits work together to not only secure endpoints, but also help organizations operationalise their endpoint security in a manner that increases efficiency, scalability, and both internal costs and burdens on IT and security departments.
Achieve Advanced Endpoint Protection with Arctic Wolf
Arctic Wolf believes that utilising proper endpoint security can help build resilience, reduce risk, and transform how you protect your organization. That’s why we’ve introduced Aurora™ Endpoint Security, a full suite of endpoint security solutions — both managed and unmanaged — to meet your organisation where it’s at while fueling your security journey.
Aurora™ Endpoint Security delivers market-leading AI-driven prevention, detection, and response, stopping threats before they disrupt your business. Designed to be easy to use and highly effective, whether on its own or with 24×7 monitoring, Arctic Wolf’s endpoint security offerings provide flexible deployment options so you can strengthen your defenses and ultimately, protect your organisation from costly breaches.
See Aurora Endpoint Security in action.
Explore the value of advanced endpoint protection with our webinar, Aurora Endpoint Security: A New Dawn for Security Teams.
