The Challenges of Endpoint Security

By Milica D. Djekic

The endpoint devices are those gadgets that would be the part of a big computing network dealing with the endpoints as its final destinations. The endpoints computing units could be capable to send and receive the information packets once they are connected to the web. Also, if we talk about the ordinary network traffic – those devices could get able to conduct similar operations, so far. All data is stored on the endpoint spots should meet the certain security procedures and policies. In so many cases, the endpoint computers would serve to the end users and either they are simply with the internet connectivity or any network connection – they would need some suggestions to get protected from cybercrime and the other hacker’s operations. In other words, when we talk about the endpoints – we would mean by that the computers with the web connectivity that would cope with some IP addresses and get some data and applications being the part of their storage. It’s quite obvious that anything being exposed to the internet could deal with some kind of cyber breach, so in such a case – we need to do a lot to secure our final destinations from those scenarios. In the practice, so many IT security experts would agree that the cyber breach is something being so inevitable and the best way to cope with such a situation is to apply the tools that would provide you an option to detect the breach. In addition, there is some best practice advice on how to secure your data being on the endpoint device. The fact is so many computing networks would use the firewalls and the other protections, so the signal coming to the endpoints could get assumed as quite reliable. On the other hand, the hacker’s incidents are not the rare case, so it’s quite important to think hard how to tackle that sort of the risk.

The endpoint spots being connected to the internet would deal with their own IP addresses and once the hackers get how to find the certain device – they may try to start exploiting its vulnerabilities. The encryption at the endpoint places is from the vital significance if we want to protect our sensitive information. There are suggestions that the cyber breaches should get accepted as our reality and the huge question here is how we could cope with any data recovery and business continuity strategies. The quite trickery situation is if your endpoint spot got the target of cyber criminals and if you literally got so annoying hacker inside your system. In such a case, it’s so important to take into consideration how to deliver the incident response being the key pillar of your cyber defense. In other words, maintaining the risk within your endpoints could get the quite complicated task, so our tip here is that you need so skillful cybersecurity professionals who would get well-trained in order to overcome all those challenges.

Providing the security to the network’s end users is the serious business, so we would recommend to anyone being with such a task to think smart in order to protect us from any kind of disadvantages. The endpoint security is not the job for amateurs and it seeks a huge knowledge that could support the IT security practitioner and his team to respond so actively to the wide spectrum of so different situations. The point is that there is no real prevention in case of endpoint systems and what we can do only is the risk management. The people may believe that the endpoints are less important in the entire security practice, but sometimes they may appear as so strategically important places.

Through this effort, we would indicate it’s the challenge protecting the endpoints and the fact is you need to deal with all three aspects of cyber defense being prevention, monitoring and incident response if you want to adequately cope with such a task. In our opinion, investing in IT infrastructure capacities could be a good decision, because your network’s asset could provide the quite qualitative and safe web traffic to the end users. Also, there are a plenty of methods to discover someone’s device being the part of the global network and then you should attempt to think like a hacker in order to realize what got uncovered within your infrastructure and at the next stage, you should think a bit like a cyber professional who is capable to cover the uncovered pieces of the situation. The reality would suggest that some parts of the cyberspace could get chronically uncovered and you would need to cover them on again and again in order to manage your risk. No problem could get resolved over the night and the purpose of cyber defense staffs is to get on a duty day by day, night by night with the task to tackle any single concern coming on. Even within some business, your employees would rely on the endpoint systems and in such a case if their computers collapse – you should need to assure the regular backups of their data. We would also mention that some of the files being on the endpoint machines should get encrypted in order to provide the lower level of the risk in case someone gets the idea to compromise them. The hackers would so clearly see all these vulnerabilities and they would know how to take advantage over your unprotected details, so if you are chronically the target to the cybercrime operations – you should know that the incident response solutions with the option to terminate someone’s connection to your endpoint machine could get the right choice.

Finally, we should see that the endpoint security is so time-consuming and it needs a lot of effort to get invested into the entire process of its cyber defense. The main point in this effort is that maybe we could try to apply a bit different point of view in terms of security and begin observing the things from the perspective of something being uncovered or vulnerable and try to figure out how such a weakness could get covered on. Once we cover our weakness – we would get less sensitive to the potential attacks or in other words, more resilient in any manner. In conclusion, cybersecurity as any defense is about the good covering on and if we master that practice, we would get in position to maintain the balance between the forces of offense and defense.

About The Author

Milica D. Djekic is an Independent Researcher from Subotica, Republic of Serbia. She received her engineering background from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade. She writes for some domestic and overseas presses and she is also the author of the book “The Internet of Things: Concept, Applications, and Security” is published in 2017 with the Lambert Academic Publishing. Milica is also a speaker with the BrightTALK expert’s channel and Cyber Security Summit Europe being held in 2016 as well as CyberCentral Summit 2019 being one of the most exclusive cyber defense events in Europe. She is the member of an ASIS International since 2017 and contributor to the Australian Cyber Security Magazine since 2019. Her fields of interests are cyber defense, technology, and business. Milica is a person with a disability.