Avast Blog_Bussines Security: The next generation of endpoint security

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For small businesses, this adaptive solution is crucial to the defense against modern cybersecurity threats

You run a business, so the term “next-gen” may not be one you’re familiar with. But as cyberattacks become more sophisticated and more businesses fall victim to cybercriminals, it is important to know. Large companies have IT departments to deploy next-generation endpoint protection, but as the owner of a small business, it may fall to you to ensure your business is protected from cybercrime.

This article will explain precisely what next-generation endpoint security is, what it offers, why it’s important, and how it differs from traditional tools.

Why do we need next-gen endpoint protection?

The simple reason we need next-gen endpoint protection is because there is a “next generation” of cyberattacks. Reacting to increased knowledge and antivirus protection, cyberattacks have become more sophisticated. Attacks can now utilize various methods from malware to social engineering and include various channels (vectors) including endpoints like phones and desktop computers.

Around 2003, cybercriminals became more advanced and attacks moved beyond simple viruses and drive-by downloads to complex, layered attacks that often involved interpersonal manipulation. To protect users from these more sophisticated attacks, cybersecurity needs to evolve. Endpoints (your devices) remain the targets and many are not always within the business network (mobile phones, tablets, laptops). As such, they don't have optimum security behind a firewall or gateway. Hackers exploit this by using a larger number of stages in their attacks, which in turn increases the need for endpoint security.

A key part of next-gen endpoint protection is to ensure that your solution continuously learns and adapts as threats evolve – always staying ahead of cybercriminals and recognizing the individuals stages of sophisticated, multi-layered attacks.

The second key need for next-gen endpoint security is to ensure it can protect all endpoints on your network – not just the ones behind your company firewall. There are increasing numbers of devices connecting to a business’s network. Each of these is a potential entry point for an attacker who could exploit out-of-date software on an employee’s phone to access data within your company network and servers. A company is as valuable as its most valuable data and as weak as its weakest point. As such, it is essential to have security in place that can protect all connected endpoints as well as your network and servers.

What is next-generation endpoint security?

In the past, signature-based antivirus – including traditional endpoint protection – was enough to stop most attacks. Today, cybercriminals are moving away from simple signature-based methods of attack. As such, next-generation endpoint security is not based solely on signatures, but uses one or more methods and/or technologies to detect and prevent an attack. For example:

Exploit mitigation

Attackers use all kinds of tools to create and execute attacks. For example, “exploits” take advantage of vulnerabilities present in the system to bypass protections and allow them to remotely compromise devices and gain privileges.

In most cases, these exploits are known vulnerabilities, which means that avoiding them involves keeping your software up to date. In a business environment, however, this is easier said than done. That’s why it is critical that your security provider is able to provide a patch management solution that will take care of that on your network.

At the same time your solutions must have exploit detection and blocking capabilities to protect you even when there are vulnerabilities that have not been patched yet.

Behavioral analysis

Cyberattacks are more than just malware, so cybersecurity needs to do more than detect malware. Using behavioral analysis, next-gen cybersecurity looks at how applications and processes interact with each other to find anomalies that suggest attacks. For example, users tend to make logical decisions and use predictable pathways – opening software, opening relevant files, etc. So if an application tries to open/read an “inappropriate” file and/or send information to unverified/suspicious websites or applications, the next-gen software will prevent – or at least question it.

An emerging trend is for cybercriminals to use non-malicious files to avoid detection and carry out attacks. For example, PowerShell, a popular tool from Microsoft that is included in all Windows 10 installations, is used extensively by cybercriminals in many attacks.
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