Why Endpoints Security is Crucial for Every Business

Why is endpoint security so important in today’s world

How many entrances are to your company’s physical office or facility? One, two, four? Regardless of how many, they’re probably all firmly secured to make sure nobody can enter without authorization. Are your “virtual doors,” network endpoints, protected just as well though?

Every single of the dozens or hundreds of devices used in your business might potentially be used by cybercriminals to infiltrate your network and then launch a network on your business. In fact, Verizon research even found that 70% of all security breaches originate at the endpoint (servers, desktops, laptops, mobile devices, and IoT devices).

The consequences of endpoint intrusions for businesses

When hackers breach network endpoints, it’s more than just a security incident. These infiltrations can lead to data theft, financial losses, reputation damage, and even regulatory repercussions. Remember the credit agency Equifax data breach? Hackers stole the personally identifying data of hundreds of millions of people from the company’s database, taking advantage of various security vulnerabilities inside the network. The company then had to pay up to $700m (£560m) in a settlement with US regulators.  

Even the enormous attack on the Colonial Pipeline in 2021 was caused by a seemingly simple thing – one stolen password that the employee reused across multiple platforms.

The Role of Security Operations Center (SOC) in Endpoint Security

With how many endpoints businesses have nowadays though, securing all of them manually is an almost impossible task though: 

• A small company with less than 50 employees has about 22 endpoints
• Businesses with 50-100 employees have roughly 114 endpoints
• Enterprise organizations with 1,000+ employees use 1,920 endpoints

For a regular company, continuously monitoring even those 20 endpoints could be a problem though – not to mention 100 or 1000. Here’s where the SOC team comes in.

What is SOC?

Security Operations Center (SOC in short) team nowadays serves as a company’s primary defense against cybersecurity threats. A SOC team is made of cybersecurity experts who monitor and manage every aspect of an organization’s security posture, dealing with everything from threat detection to incident response and cybersecurity training.

Monitoring the network’s endpoint 24/7 is one of their core tasks, as without effective endpoint monitoring, SOCs run the risk of missing critical signs of infiltration and failing to prevent the attack from spreading. That’s why fortifying all network endpoints and then proactively testing those for any vulnerabilities or suspicious behavior is a top priority for the cybersecurity teams.

Limitations of Current SOC Services in Endpoint Monitoring

As skilled and knowledgeable the SOC team experts are though, they might sometimes struggle with endpoint monitoring as well though. Why? Here are a two main  reasons:  

Alert Fatigue

Being overwhelmed with endless alerts (many of which are false positives) is one of the biggest complaints SOC team experts have about their job. SumoLogic, for example found that 56% of large organizations deal with 1,000+ security alerts daily. 

And as many SOC teams are still heavily understaffed, that leaves the experts struggling to spot serious threats out of the sea of low-priority alerts and tackle them in the first order.

Traditional SIEM tools are limited

Not only human cybersecurity workers are exhausted dealing with thousands of security alerts though – even automated tools nowadays are struggling with the workload.

SIEM tools are essential for SOC teams as they collect data from various network sources and then combine them to give cybersecurity professionals a unified view of an organization’s IT security. A SIEM’s role is to identify network abnormalities that might indicate a security incident and alert the SOC teams. 

Traditional SIEM tools, unfortunately, often fail short when it comes to endpoint security though. Older systems often get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data from endpoint devices, adding to the SOC team’s expert stress. Some of the tools also don’t have threat intelligence that could help the team distinguish serious threats from the noise. For SOC teams, that means they have to analyze, prioritize and handle the alerts themselves – again leading to alert fatigue.

Using SOCaaS to enhance endpoint security

Even if businesses wanted to build a full-size in-house cybersecurity team and use the latest cybersecurity technology though, the costs of those might be well beyond their reach. 

There is a clever way in which businesses of all sizes could take advantage of the capabilities of SOC teams but without straining their own budget. Namely, SOCaaS – SOC as a Service.

SOC is a subscription-based service that provides organizations with advanced security capabilities without the overhead of maintaining an in-house SOC and the infrastructure. You can think of them as an outsourced version of a traditional SOC team – they can handle all of the tasks of a regular SOC team, only that they work remotely rather than from your office. 

SOCaaS is also a far more affordable option of securing your business from cyber threats, as you don’t have to pay for interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and then maintaining the in-house team.

MDR as a powerful option for securing business endpoints

One of the modern tools businesses can use to fortify their endpoints but also leverage the cybersecurity experts’ skills is MDR or Managed Detection and Response. MDR combines the best of advanced threat-hunting services, forensics, and incident response capabilities, bundled into one service provided by cybersecurity service providers.

MDR tools monitor the endpoints’ behavior and activity day and night, looking out for any signs of suspicious behavior or potential threats. What makes them smarter than traditional SIEM tools though is that MDR uses various advanced technologies to analyze and detect threats. Thanks to those, MDR can spot sophisticated or disguised threats but also alert the SOC team to any unusual network user behavior – preventing insider threats as well.  

MDR can also give you access to various cutting-edge security features available inside it, such as: 

• Threat Deception: This feature fools cybercriminals into attacking imitations of databases or other critical assets and sends an automatic alert to the SOC team whenever triggered. In that way, the SOC team can stop an attack in time and protect the genuine assets.
• User Entity Behavior Analysis (UEBA): UEBA creates an automatic behavior profile of each user and entity connected to the network and then compares all user activities to the profile. If a given user or device starts to behave in an unusual way (such as trying to increase their user privileges or copying user databases), the feature will then trigger an alert to the SOC team.     
• Sandboxing: Suspicious files or code can be automatically sent to and then neutralized in an isolated virtual environment to prevent the file from affecting other data or systems.

With an MDR solution like CyberDefender, you can rest easy knowing that all your network endpoints are fully shielded from cyber threats – no matter how many of them you have. 

To find out more about how exactly the Cyber360 team can boost your endpoints security, why not schedule a call with our expert team? They will be happy to answer all your questions and guide you toward the best security solutions for business needs – all to make your endpoints and network fully secure.

Conclusion

With all the tools, devices, systems, and networks we use for work, cybercriminals have several ways to gain access to our networks. And one vulnerable place in the vast network is more than enough for them to steal sensitive data or keep the entire infrastructure unresponsive unless companies will agree to pay a hefty ransom for those. 

With the Cyber360 SOCaaS team at your service, though, you won’t have to worry anymore about the security of your network, as they will make sure to identify and neutralize anything that might be threatening your business endpoints.