Tag Archives: Endpoint Security

The Sum of all Gaps

18 January 2016

In the 11 January issue of the Cyber Intelligencer Invincea’s COO Norm Laudermilch talks about the difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of endpoint security products:

‘The key is to understand what part of the threat landscape a product covers, the scope of the protection, the efficacy of that protection, and how it fits with the rest of your security and IT architecture.’

Very well said! But it is important to take the next step: Once you have conducted this evaluation the sum of all gaps or the residual risk could be grasped.

In my opinion this is the most important information. It shows the critical vulnerabilities and, when related to the current overall threat landscape, the direction for further investments. A CISO is  well advised to do this matching regularly.

Have a good day.

The Rebirth of Endpoint Security

24 October 2015

Past Wednesday I listened to an interesting story on Information Week Dark Reading Radio. The half-hour show titled Endpoint Security Transformed is worth listening to. In her excellent post on the same subject Kelly Jackson Higgins, the host of the show, gives a great introduction to this emerging technology and market.

Endpoint protection has been poorly treated for many years. Focus was laid on detection. But the major attacks in the past years show that once the attacker got access to network this is not enough because insider threats are hardly to detect.

This quotation from Paul Calatayud, CISO of Surescripts, sums it up:

Endpoints are getting compromised, and their credentials get stolen. Then they become an insider threat.

Another statement from the show is very remarkable:

Most of the attacks exploit vulnerabilities which were already known, sometimes for more than a year.

This statement makes clear that we need entirely new provisioning and patching concepts, or sophisticated white listing methods to lock down the end-user systems. To apply e.g. just all Flash Player patches to thousands of computers is a nightmare and, extremely expensive.

Enjoy the show… and have a good weekend.