5 Signs You Need Palo Alto Networks for Endpoint Security

Published on 07 March 2018

Organizations of all sizes have to defend themselves against over 250,000 new malicious programs every day, according to the AV-TEST Institute, and their success rate is much lower than many would like to admit.

In 2017, the Ponemon Institute surveyed 665 security and IT leaders to evaluate the largest threats and the true cost of cyber attacks. According to the research think tank’s findings, “54 percent of companies experience one or more successful attacks that compromised data and/or IT infrastructure.” The cost of a successful attack is often crushing: over $5 million for a large organization, or $301 per employee on average.

The alarmingly high success rate of cyber attacks underscores the inadequacy of traditional endpoint protection technologies, such as AV (antivirus) and others, as well as the always-increasing sophistication of modern cybercriminals. The Ponemon Institute discovered that only 1 in every 3 organizations believes that its AV product can stop modern threats, and 4 out of 5 organizations have already replaced or augmented their existing AV product with a more comprehensive endpoint security solution.

Palo Alto Networks’ Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection secures endpoints with its unique multi-method prevention, blocking security breaches and successful ransomware attacks that leverage malware and exploits, known and unknown, before it can compromise your operating system’s endpoints, such as laptops, desktops and servers.

To evaluate whether your current endpoint protection is secure enough, consider how it deals with the following challenges faced in securing endpoints.

What Can An Endpoint Security Solution Protect You Against?

1. Mobile Threats

As we enter the era of BYOx (Bring Your Own Everything), it is becoming more important than ever for organizations to have visibility into what software is installed and running on employee-owned connected devices, and how are these devices, including smartphones, tablets, and wearables, configured.

Traditional endpoint protection technologies do not extend to mobile devices, enabling the growth of shadow IT and all the dangers that come with it. With Traps, users are empowered to use web, mobile and cloud-based applications without fearing cyberthreats – all these without the need to depend on burdensome virus scans. In this day and age, it is no longer feasible to prevent mobile users from having administrative rights on their own devices, but the security risks associated with their presence on the network must be minimized.

2. Remote Workers

The 2017 State of Telecommuting in the U.S. Employee Workforce Report states that the number of remote workers has increased 115 percent in a decade. With more workers than ever connecting to a company network remotely, it is necessary for endpoint protection to be able to enforce and secure configuration when computers connect to the company network and access internal resources such as applications, intranet, mail, and files.

Especially vulnerable and dangerous are remote workers with unpatched systems. Such workers can easily become targets of ransomware attacks, which cost $3,675 on average according to the Ponemon Institute, and can spread from the infected remote endpoint to other devices on the network and even cloud storage, as one company found out the hard way in 2016.

3. Zero-Day Exploits

Considering the mindboggling number of new malicious programs released every day, it is no longer enough for organizations to protect themselves against known threats. AV products and other signature-based endpoint protection technologies are vulnerable to zero-day exploits, which are a form of a cyber attack that occurs on the same day a weakness is discovered in software.

Modern endpoint security solutions like Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection preemptively block known and unknown malware, exploits, and zero-day threats using a unique multi-method prevention approach that relies on threat intelligence gained from a global community of customers and partners.

4. Fileless Attacks

According to the Ponemon Institute, 77 percent of all attacks in 2017 utilized fileless techniques, which are almost 10-times more likely to succeed than file-based attacks. Fileless attacks are often propagated using seemingly innocent email messages with links that lead to a malicious website with code that exploits a known vulnerability on the user’s computer.

The vulnerability allows the attackers to load a script from a command-and-control server and execute it without ever saving a single file on the computer. The script typically sends sensitive data to the attacker. Attacks like this are very hard to detect using traditional endpoint protection technologies, which is why organizations should never rely solely on antivirus and personal firewall software as a complete solution.

Palo Alto Networks was one of the first to recognize this loophole and introduced an update in late 2017 to provide expanded protection against ransomware including enhanced kernel exploit protection and behavior-based ransomware protection that can detect, prevent and block attacks without interfering with legitimate processes and encryption tools.

5. Cloud Vulnerabilities

As explained by Jay Heiser, vice president and cloud security lead at Gartner, “The volume of public cloud utilization is growing rapidly, so that inevitably leads to a greater body of sensitive stuff that is potentially at risk.” While many cloud-related vulnerabilities can be addressed by improving security practices, only a comprehensive endpoint security solution can effectively protect against advanced persistent threats (APT), application vulnerabilities, and targeted attacks.

It’s no wonder Palo Alto Networks was named a Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms 2017. Adopting a multi-method approach towards malware protection, Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection combines several methods including WildFire threat intelligence, which is the world’s largest distributed sensor system focused on identifying and preventing unknown threats and converting to known threats, with more than 17,000 enterprise, government and service provider customers contributing to the collective immunity of all other users across endpoints, networks and cloud applications.

Conclusion

There are numerous challenges faced in securing endpoints, and the consequences of their negligence are higher than ever. It is no longer only large enterprises that have to worry about cybersecurity—small and medium-sized organizations have become common targets of opportunistic cybercriminals who seek to make easy profit, hoping to come across an organization with insufficient endpoint security.

The good news is that effective endpoint protection is now available to organizations of all sizes. At AsiaPac, we have considerable years of experience in helping our customers secure their endpoints against known and unknown malware and exploits with Palo Alto Networks’ Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection, which is considered to be the industry gold standard in advanced endpoint protection.

Contact us to learn more about our endpoint security solution before you become a statistic. Asiapac is an authorised Amazon consulting partner in Singapore.

Tags: AEP, Cyberattack, Cybersecurity, Endpoint Protection, Palo Alto Networks, Security,

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