Neutralizing Threats Before They Affect Business

By Ashwani Mishra, ETCIO.com

As business models digitize, hackers are adapting to sophisticated techniques to breach enterprise networks and/or steal data. For enterprises, the biggest challenge is to detect a single well-clocked threat in an ocean of network traffic rather than merely react.

A report from McAfee finds that each day more than 157 million attempts are made to entice users to click malicious URLs. More than 353 million infected files are exposed to customer networks. And an additional 71 million potentially unwanted programs attempt installation.

According to recent findings, security solutions emerge all the time to address potential vulnerabilities, but, for CDOs, CIOs and CISOs, managing all of those disparate tools has become a massively complex and labor-intensive task.

The present reality

Too much firefighting: On an average, it takes companies 201 days to detect a breach, which is immensely difficult, according to a 2016 Ponemon Institute study of 383 companies. These advanced targeted attacks are designed to get past traditional security, such as antivirus and firewalls. As a result, security and IT teams are constantly playing catch-up, devoting enormous time and resources reacting to emergencies.

Too much complexity: Identifying the tools that security teams rely on, make the job more complex and expensive. It’s complicated to stay ahead of emerging threats when all of these solutions don’t share the threat intelligence.

Too little visibility: Usually, security operations teams don’t have the visibility they need across endpoint infrastructure. Largely breaches compromise their targets within minutes, whereas it takes enterprises, around 256 days to identify a malicious attack.

Security and threat intelligence solutions have vast measures to protect businesses against sophisticated malware. But for many enterprises, these point solutions offer only isolated threat intelligence and generates an avalanche of alerts-thousands every day from across the infrastructure. And there’s just not enough time and manpower to cut through the noise.

Proactive security

To get ahead of the problem enterprises require a smarter way to detect, respond to, and contain sophisticated zero-day attacks. Solutions that provide a holistic view into endpoint behavior-not just alerts from point solutions operating in silos. Neutralize threats across the threat defense lifecycle

To do this, enterprises may choose to operate on the entire threat defense lifecycle - protection, detection, and correction - and how defenses at each stage can be effective. CDOs, CIOs and CISOs may utilize unified tools to detect the unknown, quickly correlate the risk, and correct the threat before it escalates.

The endpoints, plays a critical role in the threat defense lifecycle. A sound strategy for endpoints embraces three overarching principles:

The endpoints should act as the foundation of defenses-and the deepest source of insight. Endpoints and security solutions should share real-time intelligence and actionable forensics. All of the defenses should work together and with the endpoints in a collaborative, centralized way, so they can react to threats automatically.

According to the McAfee’s report, these principles could create an environment where endpoints and security solutions continually learn from each other to identify and stop suspicious activity-without requiring manual intervention at each step in the process.