Month: June 2023

Endpoint Security: Overview 

Vulnerable endpoints can lead to serious IT incidents. Protecting endpoints with adequate security controls is of paramount importance to avert breaches and insider attacks. 

While organizations have several security measures in place to secure their servers and data centers, the endpoints unfortunately do not receive as much attention as they should be. Endpoints carry a significant security risk because they provide access to business applications many times critical in nature while sometimes endpoint privileges are also granted to conduct IT tasks on different Oses (privilege elevation and delegation management). A compromised insider or some sort of social engineering by malicious elements can exploit endpoints to gain critical information.

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute found that:

• Almost 81% of organizations revealed that endpoint security is the ‘most sought after’ security in complex IT infrastructure today. The proliferation of hybrid work practices has made data access methodologies more open and riskier in all areas in the IT ecosystem.
• To manage risk, 69% of respondents say their organizations either currently outsource endpoint protection to an MSP or any other third party.
• Only 47% of organizations monitor their networks 24/7, and only 50% encrypt sensitive data that are stored on endpoints/ devices

ARCON’s 10 Recommendations for Protecting Endpoints 

Based on day-to-day practical enterprise use cases, ARCON lists 10 recommendations for robust endpoint security. 

1. Mapping end users: What can be done if there is deployment requirement of Endpoint Security for a large number of endpoints? Just think of a situation when the organization is ready to secure their ever-increasing number of endpoints but worried about the time taken in the deployment process.  There is no idea about how to segregate end users based on their responsibilities.  ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) helps organizations to run the activities normally for the first thirty days without hampering the regular work process. No restriction is applied during this time. With the help of “Automated Profiling” feature ARCON | EPM gathers the data, identifies the profile, and determines the necessary access areas. After thirty days, based on the users’ usage patterns, ARCON | EPM segregates them into user groups based on the process they have used. This removes the tediousness of manual integration and profile creation and ensures seamless IT operations. 

2. Implementing unified engine to control end users: Once profiling is done, is it possible to manage and control those profiles seamlessly? There are multiple levels of users in multiple functional departments. ARCON | EPM offers “Centralized Profiling” mechanism that helps to manage existing profiles and new profiles for various departments in an IT ecosystem. Centralized profiling enables granular level segregation of profiles in every department, and ARCON | EPM helps the IT admin to set a default profile as well for a user, group of users, endpoints and a group of endpoints based on OS type. This helps admins to keep a systematic track of user profiles.

3. Contextualization of data: Every day a large volume of data is generated. Therefore, it is important to understand “where” “what” and “who” of data. How about securing and categorizing different endpoint data? It is extremely essential to classify and categorize data while allowing access to any specific set of users. ARCON | EPM offers “Data Intellect” feature that enables the classification and categorization of the critical data in the enterprise network. It not just helps to itemize data as per users but also prevents any malicious activity with the data assets. Data Intellect identifies risky or suspicious data files present on endpoints that should be prevented from access (or transfer anywhere) to maintain the integrity of the data assets.

4. Enforcing credentials vaulting: Weak password management is the leading cause of breaches and insider attacks. ARCON | EPM offers “Credential Rotation” feature that helps administrators to vault and rotate credentials for endpoints regularly. The admin can even create a stringent policy by providing length, use of characters, non-repetitive passwords etc. based on which the rotation is done. Undoubtedly, this prevents chances of password misuse and keeps the organization secure from unauthorized access on the endpoints.

5. Ensuring access based on “need-to-know” and “need-to-do” basis: What could happen if any user requests access to any application to perform any task and the request is granted? The scheduled task might be completed, but at the same time there could be risks of unauthorized activities. ARCON | EPM provides “just-in-time” privilege elevation through which any user can get one-time access to any application based on roles and user profiles. Not just that, the duration of the task can be prescheduled and privileged access rights are revoked immediately after the task is accomplished. This feature ensures implementation of the Least Privileges principle and follows Zero Trust architecture. 

6. Complying with baseline policies: What are the security risks if there is any unapproved modification to any data file? It can simply impact the security, integrity and confidentiality of data assets in the organization. ARCON | EPM offers “File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)” that keeps on checking and identifying any modifications or changes made to any file or directory. It continuously monitors critical system files, and configuration files/ folders to detect unauthorized changes done by end users, intentionally, accidentally or for some other purpose.  Once ARCON’s FIM discovers such changes, alerts are delivered to the IT administrator who investigates and takes prompt action. FIM enables IT security teams in maintaining an organization’s compliance policy. 

7. Eliminating data exfiltration: How does it impact data security if any user connects mobile devices or any removable storage with desktop/ laptop within enterprise IT periphery? It can compromise endpoint security with critical data loss – that too without the knowledge of the IT security team. ARCON | EPM’s “Data Loss Prevention (DLP)” feature helps organizations to mitigate data security vulnerabilities by restricting mobile devices or any removable devices from accessing any data asset from any system at any point of time. Even mobile Bluetooth connections and Bluetooth transfers are restricted with ARCON’s DLP feature. Hence, there are no chances of data being compromised. 

8. Implementing strong authentication: What if an IT administrator wants some additional authentication for any specific endpoint? To ensure verification and re-verification of any user, ARCON | EPM offers “Two-factor Authentication” feature that works as an additional security step to authorize and authenticate user activities especially Windows login, any critical application access or any sensitive URL access. If the administrator wishes to have an additional security layer during endpoint access, this feature works as an additional validation step as and when required.

9. Identifying anomalous profiles: The risk assessment teams of modern organizations prefer predictive security mechanisms to preventive security measures. The simple reason behind is “Better safe than Sorry”! What could happen if users’ behaviour is not monitored after they are given privileged rights? If any anomalous is done by the users, it could go unnoticed and that itself is a risk. Accordingly, ARCON | EPM provides “User Behaviour Analytics” feature that detects anomalous behaviour profiles on real-time and generates risk-based scores for each user with the help of advanced Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. These scores help the Risk Manager to take crucial decisions regarding permissions/ denials.

10. Isolating malicious applications: What could happen if there is any malicious application running in the IT environment? It could simply lead to data loss, financial loss, service disruption, IT downtime, decreased productivity and what not! ARCON | EPM offers “Application Security” feature that secures the endpoints by detecting the malicious applications and blacklisting those applications and URLs before notifying it to the administrator. At the same time, application security helps in situations when any blacklisted application needs to be whitelisted temporarily and blacklist it again within a certain time. 

Conclusion

ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) builds comprehensive security layer around endpoints. It enables compliance with organizations’ security policies and enforces controlled access to business-critical applications.