Protecting Remote Workers: Endpoint Security Is More Critical Than Ever

The personal and business response to the coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic means that we have a sudden, massive remote workforce like we’ve never seen before. While this scenario will not last forever, the concept of remote working has been an encroaching culture shift for years as companies have had to compete for talent. Flex-remote working may finally become standardized as lives are disrupted and businesses face the reality of adapting.

There’s a massive challenge here to figure out how to keep businesses up and running in this new model while making sure remote access needs are met. Unfortunately, remote computing significantly increases an organization’s exposure to security risks they may not have fully understood or dealt with before.

A remote workforce means there are many more employee workstations sitting outside the corporate network. Millions of employees are connecting to confidential company information via home networks with likely no firewall protecting the home networks. The reality is unfortunate, but there are real threat actors taking advantage of lack of security. You may have already seen the fake coronavirus maps and other phishing emails luring users into unknowingly exposing corporate credentials or downloading malware and/or ransomware.

Ransomware is strictly about financial gain, and every organization is an equally viable target. So excuses like “we’re too small to be attacked” or “we’re an uninteresting business” are no longer tolerated. Threat actors often target unprotected devices (especially a personal device) and wait until they are reconnected to the corporate network to launch a broad takeover of data for ransom.

Most people have heard of Antivirus protection.  Endpoint security has all the capabilities of antivirus protection and much more:

• Web protection:  Prevents access to malicious websites, ad networks, scammer network, etc
• Application Hardening: Takes your vital application and makes it more difficult to tamper with
• Exploit Mitigation:  Proactively detects and blocks attempts to abuse vulnerabilities
• Application Behavior:  Prevents applications from being used to infect your machines
• Anomaly Detection Machine Learning:  Proactively identifies viruses and malware through machine learning techniques
• Payload Analysis:  Identifies entire families of known and relevant malware
• Ransomware Mitigation:  Detects and blocks ransomware via behavioral monitoring technology