Frustration and anxiety. Those are two words that come to mind after reading Cybersecurity Insiders’ 2019 Endpoint Security Report. A majority of organizations report an increase in the risk to their endpoints as the number of new threats, particularly fileless malware, advanced attacks and evasive threats, continues to rise. Many have responded by increasing their endpoint security budgets and deploying multiple next-gen endpoint security agents. Yet, they still feel unprepared to thwart these new threats.
You can’t solve a problem until you identify the root cause, and that’s the good news in the report. Cybersecurity Insiders polled hundreds of cybersecurity professionals ranging from technical executives to managers and IT security practitioners, and the majority of them understand the problem:
- 53% report an increase or significant increase in endpoint security risk likely due to the proliferation of new threats.
- 76% see endpoint security becoming more important in the future as a result of the increased risk.
They’ve identified the problem and they’re trying to solve it. 41% expect to increase their endpoint security budgets for 2019, and about one third of organizations have more than four different endpoint security agents, including AV, DLP, encryption and EDR on their endpoints.
The bad news: higher awareness of the threats, budget increases and implementing more next-gen endpoint security technologies do not translate to a stronger security posture:
- Only half of organizations are very confident or extremely confident in their organization’s endpoint security posture.
- 50% believe their current endpoint security posture can stop 75% of attacks or more. 21% estimate less than 50% of attacks will be stopped.
- 32% experienced one or more attacks that successfully compromised data or IT infrastructure in the past 12 months.
- 54% believe it is moderately likely to extremely likely that they will experience successful cyber attacks in the next 12 months.
The ineffectiveness of their endpoint security solutions is the primary reason for this collective feeling of helplessness. Respondents cited several issues, including:
- 49% say their current endpoint security solutions deliver insufficient protection against newest attacks.
- 43% fault the high complexity of deployment and operation.
- 31% expressed frustration over high rates of false positives.
- 27% cite the negative impact of current technologies on user experience.
The next-gen endpoint security technologies these organizations are deploying are unable to detect and thwart the ever-growing number of new malicious threats because they all leverage the same “enumeration of badness” approach. They look for what has been identified as “bad” and try to block anything that falls under that broad umbrella. It worked 20 years ago, but not today.
All organizations, no matter their size or industry, need to combine Negative and Positive Security models. Positive Security defines what is allowed (aka “good” or “known”), and rejects everything else. Having both Positive and Negative Security solutions in your security stack provides the highest possible endpoint protection. That is what Nyotron’s PARANOID delivers.
We’ve seen countless examples of PARANOID customers simplify their endpoint security stacks by consolidating from 4-5 disparate endpoint security solutions to just one, such as Windows Defender AV. This enables them to dramatically improve endpoint performance and security. Additionally, organizations with mission-critical servers are able to break their reliance on decade-old application whitelisting products that were nightmares to manage and failed to protect against zero-days or fileless malware.
You can read the entire 2019 Endpoint Security Report here. If you experience the same sinking feeling that a majority of the survey respondents expressed over their endpoint security posture, take action.
Mark your calendars for Nov. 29th at 2 p.m. Eastern for our live webinar “How to Boost Endpoint Security in 2019”. Holger Schulze from Cybersecurity Insiders and I will examine the survey’s findings and explore what you can do in 2019 to better mitigate the risks to your endpoints and the invaluable information users create and store on them. Use this link to register to attend.
