The Importance of EDR Security
As remote work becomes more common, strong endpoint security is an increasingly vital component of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy. Deploying an effective EDR security solution is essential to protecting both the enterprise and the remote worker from cyber threats.
EDR is designed to go beyond detection-based, reactive cyber defense. Instead, it provides security analysts with the tools that they need to proactively identify threats and protect the organization. EDR provides a number of features that improve the organization’s ability to manage cybersecurity risk, such as:
- Improved Visibility: EDR security solutions perform continuous data collection and analytics, and report to a single, centralized system. This provides a security team with full visibility into the state of the network’s endpoints from a single console.
- Rapid Investigations: EDR solutions are designed to automate data collection and processing, and certain response activities. This enables a security team to rapidly gain context regarding a potential security incident and quickly take steps to remediate it.
- Remediation Automation: EDR solutions can automatically perform certain incident response activities based upon predefined rules. This enables them to block or rapidly remediate certain incidents and reduces load on security analysts.
- Contextualized Threat Hunting: EDR solutions’ continuous data collection and analysis provide deep visibility into an endpoint’s status. This allows threat hunters to identify and investigate potential signs of an existing infection.
EDR & EPP
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) have similar goals but are designed to fulfill different purposes. EPP is designed to provide device-level protection by identifying malicious files, detecting potentially malicious activity, and providing tools for incident investigation and response.
The preventative nature of EPP complements proactive EDR. EPP acts as the first line of defense, filtering out attacks that can be detected by the organization’s deployed security solutions. EDR acts as a second layer of protection, enabling security analysts to perform threat hunting and identify more subtle threats to the endpoint.
Effective endpoint defense requires a solution that integrates the capabilities of both EDR and EPP to provide protection against cyber threats without overwhelming an organization’s security team.
Key Components of an EDR solution
As its name suggests, an EDR security solution should provide support for both cyber threat detection and response on an organization’s endpoints. In order to enable security analysts to effectively and proactively detect cyber threats, an EDR solution should have the following components:
- Incident Triaging Flow: Security teams are commonly overwhelmed with alerts, a large percentage of which are false positives. An EDR should automatically triage potentially suspicious or malicious events, enabling the security analyst to prioritize their investigations.
- Threat Hunting: Not all security incidents are blocked or detected by an organization’s security solutions. EDR should provide support for threat hunting activities to enable security analysts to proactively search for potential intrusion.
- Data Aggregation and Enrichment : Context is essential to correctly differentiating between true threats and false positives. EDR security solutions should use as much data as is available to make informed decisions about potential threats.
Once a threat has been identified, a security analyst needs to be able to rapidly pivot to remediating the threat. This requires the following capabilities:
- Integrated Response: Context-switching degrades an analyst’s ability to rapidly and effectively respond to security incidents. Analysts should be able to immediately take action to respond to a security incident after reviewing the associated evidence.
- Multiple Response Options: The appropriate response to a cyber threat depends on a number of factors. An EDR security solution should present analysts with multiple response options, such as eradicating vs. quarantining a particular infection.
Why EDR Security Is More Crucial than Ever
Endpoint security has always been an important part of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. While network-based defenses are effective at blocking a high percentage of cyberattacks, some will slip through and others (like malware carried by removable media) can bypass these defenses entirely. An endpoint-based defense solution enables an organization to implement defense-in-depth and increase its probability of identifying and responding to these threats.
However, the importance of strong endpoint protection has grown as organizations increasingly support remote working. Employees working from home may not be protected against cyber threats to the same degree as on-site workers and may be using personal devices or ones that lack the latest updates and security patches. Additionally, employees working in a more casual environment may be more casual about their cybersecurity as well.
All of these factors expose the organization and its employees to additional cybersecurity risk. This makes strong endpoint security essential since it protects the employee from infection and can stop cybercriminals from using a teleworker’s computer as a stepping stone to attack the enterprise network.
Check Point’s advanced endpoint protection solutionis a comprehensive security solution for organizations operating in a new “work from home” reality with remote employees. It provides protection against the most imminent threats to the endpoints with instant and full remediation, even in offline mode, including ransomware and other malware. To see how Check Point can help to protect your remote workforce from cyber threats, schedule a demo to see Check Point Harmony Endpoint in action.
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