68% of organizations experienced at least one or more endpoint attacks. Learn how to secure your endpoints from malicious attacks.  

What is an Endpoint?

An endpoint describes a device, tool, service, or application that is connected to a computer network. It can be anything from hardware devices such as desktop computers, laptops, tablets, printers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices to endpoint software like virtual environments and applications.

Endpoints are an essential part of any computer network. They also present major cybersecurity risks for any company. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, over 68% of organizations experienced one or more endpoint attacks. These attacks include vulnerability exploits, phishing scams, and ransomware.  

Employee devices are the gateway into a company’s crown jewels or critical resources, making them the default points of entry for a cybercriminal. This becomes more of a concern for remote workers who rely on BYOD practices or Bring Your Own Device. Plugging into an unsecured port of entry such as a public Wi-Fi hotspot at a local cafe can literally open the door to an attack.  

Although companies have become a lot more flexible with BYOD policies, they must have a plan of action in the event of an attack. For this reason alone, endpoint protection should be at the forefront of any security plan for any size organization.

What Is Not An Endpoint?

A device on a computer network that is not on the end of a communication channel should not be considered an endpoint. These are devices that are connected to a network but are instead used to access the internet or a different kind of service on the computer’s network. They included devices such as routers, switches, and network gateways.

What is an API?

API stands for application programming interface and is used to refer to a set of rules that describe how applications and devices communicate with one another. APIs are used to access software or functionality from other software. Developers rely on APIs to build apps, collect large sets of data, and automate tedious tasks.

An API acts as a middleman between two machines or applications and allows both parties to talk with each other. To get a better understanding of how an API works, let’s use a restaurant scenario where a waiter (API) takes your order (request), delivers it to the kitchen, and then brings you your order (response). 

APIs are used for all sorts of online activities. A common real-life example of commonly used API integrations is travel booking sites. Have you ever wondered how these sites are able to compile a list of flights, hotels, or restaurants based on your requests? Well, the answer to that question is simply with the help of a sophisticated API. 

These sites, called aggregators, use third-party API data from hotels, airlines, car rentals, and restaurants to collect open availabilities or slots from around the internet and allow you to quickly make a reservation or booking with the same APIs. APIs simplify the way we do things and should be protected to prevent valuable data from being leaked.

 What is an API Endpoint?

Although the traditional VPN has come a long way since its PPTP roots, there have been many roadblocks that exist today. Let’s take a closer look at some of the limitations of a VPN.

What is Endpoint Security?

Endpoint security keeps physical devices protected from outside threats. Each endpoint in a corporate network provides a point of entry and a golden opportunity for a malicious actor to plan an attack. Remote workers can create many vulnerabilities that can result from a poor and unstable public Wi-Fi connection to accessing company documents without authorization.   

Endpoint security solutions such as firewalls and a Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) enable businesses to protect their physical devices and applications connected to a corporate network from cyber threats. They also ensure that all devices remain compliant with regulations such as HIPAA or GDPR. Endpoint security companies can also help ensure that your endpoints are fully monitored and data from these endpoints are collected and analyzed for any threats. An endpoint protection platform (EPP) can also reduce security incidents.

Do I Need to Monitor API Endpoints?

Absolutely. Proactive monitoring of network traffic at API endpoints is essential for any business. API monitoring is critical in improving API performance, downtime, and customer experience. Data validation is another important area of API monitoring to ensure that your data is accurate and clean. 

Companies are able to better mitigate risk and avoid lost revenue in downtime. The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute and as high as $540,000 for larger organizations.

How To Choose an API Monitoring Tool

Monitoring your API is necessary to ensure they are always dependable since you can quickly detect and fix issues before they occur. There are a few factors to take into consideration when choosing an API monitoring tool. Here are six of them. 

• Integrations – A good API monitoring tool should support multiple third-party integrations with cloud providers, logging tools, team communication platforms, and the ability to run monitoring for a CI/CD pipeline to gain valuable insights and total visibility. 
• Data Validation – The API monitoring tool should be able to easily inspect response data and support parsing formats such as JSON to validate the data accuracy. Making sure that the value of a specific field matches the expected response can ensure the data is validated. 
• Alerting – Security analysts rely on alerts and notifications to fix critical issues before they can escalate. Alerts can be separated by levels of urgency and should be logged with a log management tool to keep track of all details. 
• Team Collaboration – Communication is everything. The ability to effectively communicate with team members can not only reduce potential errors or duplicate data logging, it can also reduce overall costs for a company. 
• Security – Security is by far the most important feature to take into consideration. All parameters should be secured with high levels of encryption to prevent malicious attacks which can result in a breach. 
• Pricing – Pricing can be a determining factor when choosing an API monitoring tool, however, it is more important that the features meet your criteria.  

There are, of course, other things to consider when purchasing an API monitoring tool such as dashboards, analytics, and compliance regulations. Some of the most notable API monitoring tools in the market include APImetrics, SmartBear, and Postman. See how Perimeter 81 helped Postman, the leading API developer platform deploy hundreds of endpoints under two months during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Why Do Attackers Target Endpoints?

Over 70% of successful network breaches start from a breached endpoint. Endpoints provide an easy point of entry for an attack, especially for remote workers that connect from unsecured hotspots. It comes as no surprise that endpoints are the go-to choice for malicious attacks.  

Since the pandemic, more companies have shifted resources to the cloud and have become a lot more flexible in terms of working remotely. With the added flexibility, however, come new security concerns as more points of entry are exposed. 

Couple this with the fact that employees do not take up the personal responsibility to establish endpoint security on their devices, and you have vulnerable points of access into a company’s network that malicious actors use to their advantage. 

It is for this reason why having hosted endpoint security is absolutely necessary for the safety of your network. With endpoint security threats becoming more sophisticated as time goes by, endpoint security solutions are no longer a choice but a necessity.

 Endpoint Security Tools

Endpoint security tools track, monitor, and manage endpoint devices that are located on a computer network to protect them from any malicious activities. While mostly similar to the traditional security software, endpoint security tools include additional features that are tailored to endpoint devices to ensure the safety of a company.

Now more than ever endpoint security companies are in the limelight to provide effective, efficient, and reliable enterprise endpoint security solutions, as endpoint security threats become more sophisticated. 

In fact, the endpoint security market is expected to reach an astonishing $18.6 billion by 2027. And with the sudden increase in IoT devices and the need to protect remote workers, more organizations will be shopping around for endpoint security software solutions.

Here are a few endpoint security solutions to consider.

• IBM Trusteer Endpoint Protection. Famously known as Rapport, this endpoint security tool is used to protect users from financial fraud. The advanced endpoint security software is specifically designed to protect users from financial malware and phishing attacks. 

Trusteer Rapport is widely recommended by some of the largest banks in the world to protect users while conducting online payment transactions. This way, users can protect themselves from financial fraud, identity theft, and phishing attacks.

• K7 Endpoint Security. This endpoint security tool provides companies with scalable enterprise endpoint security software to protect them from targeted attacks. 

The endpoint security tool is available in on-premises or cloud deployment models and has been established as a reliable endpoint security solution that will effectively protect a business’ endpoints without messing with the devices’ performances.

• Kaseya Endpoint Security. This endpoint security software tool detects and deletes malware in a company’s network. This tool is available as an on-premise solution and effectively deals with malware on your business’ network based on user-defined policies.
• Duo Trusted Endpoints. This is an endpoint security tool that allows you to effectively manage your endpoints and prevent unauthorized access. The tool assists users in defining managed and unmanaged endpoints that can access applications. 

Duo’s technology features device health verification and certificate verification to determine whether an endpoint is managed or unmanaged and grants access to critical applications accordingly.

Benefits of Endpoint Security

Businesses from all sectors and sizes are quickly realizing the importance of endpoint security, especially with today’s WFH model. 

Let us take a look at a few benefits of endpoint security.

• Security from The Ground Up – Endpoint security tools can protect cloud resources and infrastructure from external threats. Cloud security is essential in keeping sensitive company resources and data safe. 
• Cost Effective – The cost of a data breach as of 2022 is $4.24 million. Having endpoint security tools such as a Business VPN in place can protect one of the riskiest parts of your network ensuring your data is safe and protecting you from the expensive cost that comes with a data breach.
• Increased Patch Management – Unpatched endpoints and software can create a gateway for hackers to access your system. Outdated software can contain many security weaknesses and vulnerabilities which can be easily exploited. 

Endpoint security tools can detect these vulnerabilities early on so your IT and development teams can fix any issues from the start. In general, you should always update your software and applications to the latest versions to prevent attacks. Simple and Fast Deployment – Organizations can deploy new security technologies without the hassle and countless hours spent on configuration. Teams can quickly and safely deploy security solutions and tools on a single endpoint security platform.

Cloud-Based Endpoint Security

Cloud-based endpoint security, unlike traditional endpoint security solutions, focuses more on an organization’s cloud infrastructure and network. 79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach.  

Cloud-based endpoint security solutions provide businesses with automatic cloud endpoint backup, ensuring your data remains fully secured even in the event of a data breach. Another benefit of cloud-based endpoint security is that it is extremely cost effective. Companies can scale quickly and manage policies in the cloud. 

With more employees working from remote locations and accessing company network resources virtually through the cloud, there has been a growing need to protect endpoint security clients and remote access VPN clients through cloud-based endpoint security solutions. Setup and installation can take minutes instead of days and require little to no IT maintenance at all. 

AWS VPC Endpoint      

An AWS VPC endpoint makes it possible to privately connect to a virtual private cloud (VPC) without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. This provides a unique way to protect your VPC as using an AWS VPC endpoint prevents your VPC from being exposed to the public internet. There are two types of AWS VPC endpoints: 

AWS gateway endpoints and AWS interface endpoints. Gateway Load Balancer endpoints serve as an entry point to intercept traffic and route it to a network. They also operate at the network layer of the OSI model and forward traffic to the targeted group.

  For security clients looking to beef up their security and privacy concerns, AWS VPC endpoints for AWS S3 enable users to access their S3 buckets without exposure to the public internet. Every time you make a request in your VPC to an AWS S3 endpoint, the request will be rerouted to a private AWS S3 network within the Amazon network without exposing you to the public internet.

Azure Private Endpoint

An Azure private endpoint is a network interface that supplies a private IP address from your virtual network (VNet), giving you secure access to services hosted on the Azure platform. Private endpoint properties include a name, private link resource, target subresource, subnet, request message, and connection status. 

The private endpoint must be deployed in the same region and subscription as the VNet and the private link resource can be deployed in a different region than the virtual network and private endpoint. Connections can only be established in a single direction. Multiple private endpoints can also be created on the same or different subnets within the same VNet.

Google Cloud Endpoints

Google Cloud Endpoints assist in securing, monitoring, analyzing, and setting quotas on your APIs on any Google Cloud backend. Some of the main features of Cloud Endpoints include automated deployment using the App Engine and the ability to manage your APIs with an NGINX-based proxy to better manage incoming traffic. 

Cloud Endpoints allow you to validate every call with JSON Web Tokens and Google API keys to control user access. Pricing is structured by API calls per month and cost per million API calls.

Kubernetes Endpoints

Kubernetes are used to list and track the IP addresses of the pods the service is sending traffic towards. The Kubernetes endpoints ensure that there is a record of all internal pods so they can effectively communicate with one another. Whenever a new pod is matched by the Kubernetes service, its IP address is to your Kubernetes endpoint. EndpointSlices track network endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster. 

 Salesforce OAuth Endpoints

While a Salesforce API endpoint is typically a URL used to gain data on Salesforce, Salesforce OAuth Endpoints are the URLs you use to make OAuth authentication requests to Salesforce. It is essential to use the correct Salesforce OAuth endpoint when issuing a request to gain access to your organization’s protected resources.The Salesforce endpoint URL will assist in defining which data and how the data is supposed to be provided.

What is Endpoint Protection?

Endpoint protection describes the practice of securing and protecting endpoints against cyberattacks. Endpoint protection plays a major role in network security and in discovering weaknesses which can be corrected early on. 

The new trend of BYOD to work has forced organizations to step up their security game and protect the most vulnerable points of entry for an attacker, making endpoint protection solutions a high demand.

An Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) is an advanced solution that incorporates endpoint device security into a single product combining antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, and application control all into one advanced endpoint protection package. 

An EPP provides more accurate detection with real-time threat intelligence and comprehensive analysis. As a result, organizations are able to pinpoint the source of a potential attack and remediate it instantly. Endpoint DLP (Data Loss Prevention) can also be used to safeguard data and intellectual property from outside threats.

What is Endpoint Detection and Response?

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is an endpoint security solution used to provide endpoint visibility. Endpoint detection and response tools are used to provide real-time continuous monitoring of endpoints and collect activity data from these endpoints. The tools then analyze this data for any threats, investigate them, and provide remediation.

A few key features to look for when choosing an Endpoint Detection and Response security system include: 

• Real-time continuous monitoring
• Advanced threat blocking
• Forensics and analysis 
• Incident response
• Threat hunting
• Filtering capabilities 
• Alert triage

What is Endpoint Encryption?

Endpoint encryption is an endpoint security tool that uses encryption algorithms to protect sensitive data stored on an endpoint. 

Endpoint encryption helps defend against:

• Evil Maid Attacks – These attacks describe a scenario in which an attacker gains physical access to a device left unattended in a hotel room. 
• Lost or Stolen Devices – One of the biggest threats to an organization is the physical theft of a device such as a laptop or a smartphone. Malicious actors can gain instant access to highly confidential data such as credit card numbers or medical records. 
• Phishing Attacks – 36% of data breaches involve phishing attacks which is a type of social engineering tactic targeting unsuspecting victims via email. 
• Old Devices – Companies discard old devices which can still contain sensitive information. That’s why it is also advisable to perform a factory reset on a laptop or remove any valuable files onto a separate USB drive. 

There are also two types of endpoint encryption, known as Full-disk encryption (FDE) or whole disk encryption and file encryption. 

Full-disk encryption (FDE) – FDE encrypts the entire drive and operating system except for the master boot record. 

File encryption – File-based encryption relies more on a company’s policies to define specific content and define how the encryption should be performed. 

What is a VPC Endpoint?

A VPC endpoint is used to describe a virtual device, which is horizontally scalable, redundant, and highly available. The VPC endpoint enables the communication between EC2 instances within your Virtual Private Cloud and other supported AWS services. All this without introducing availability risks or bandwidth constraints on your network traffic. 

VPC endpoints provide a way for the EC2 instances to communicate without requiring public addresses and the traffic exchanged does not leave the AWS network. 

There are two types of VPC endpoints called gateway endpoints and interface endpoints:

Gateway endpoints – Gateway endpoints route traffic from instances in a subnet in a route table to connect VPC resources to S3 or DynamoDB.Interface endpoints – Interface endpoints are static connect traffic from an instance to a service such as SQS. It is also an elastic network interface that allows a private IP address in a subnet to connect VPC resources to a number of AWS services.

VPC Endpoint vs. VPC Peering

When it comes to VPC endpoint vs. VPC peering, there are very few similarities between the two. While a VPC endpoint allows you to privately connect to AWS-hosted services within your VPC without using an Internet Gateway, firewalls, VPNs, or Network Address Translation (NAT), VPC peering enables two peered VPCs to communicate with each other by routing traffic through private IP addresses.

VPC peering connections do not support cross-region access, while VPC endpoints do support a direct connection in various regions. A few other key differences between the two is that route configuration only needs to be set up once with a VPC endpoint and connection to multiple VPCs will not have overlapping subnets. 

What is The Difference Between Endpoint Security and a Firewall?

Both endpoint security and firewall have the same goals. They are both used to help secure your network and devices from targeted cyberattacks. Nevertheless, firewalls are used to filter traffic flowing in and out of your network according to a set of security rules. 

They are in most cases your main line of defense. If you have ever been restricted from entering a website because of safety issues, then that is your firewall at work. Organizations use rule-based firewalls to filter out potentially harmful traffic from unsafe URLs and to limit access to corporate resources to authorized team members only. Endpoint security on the other hand does more than just network filtering. Endpoint security solutions also perform tasks like monitoring, logging, patching, and many other activities to protect your endpoints. Endpoint security tools can work in parallel with other security tools to give your IT full visibility and a 360 degree view of your network.

What’s The Difference Between Endpoint Security and Network Security?

There are a few similarities between endpoint security and network security. Endpoint security involves protecting any physical devices connected to your network such as laptops and servers from malicious attackers. Endpoint security software services work by monitoring endpoints, searching for vulnerabilities, and responding to them before an attack occurs.

Network security on the other hand is about protecting your network from cyberattacks. It utilizes an array of solutions and activities to ensure that data on the company’s network is only accessed by authorized users. Using a Corporate VPN can significantly minimize the attack surface and keep network resources safe.

Endpoint Protection vs. Antivirus: What Is the Difference?

One of the main differences between endpoint protection and antivirus software is that the antivirus will be installed on an individual device, whereas endpoint protection solutions usually cover an entire enterprise. 

Antiviruses will typically be installed on individual devices such as desktops or smartphones. They will then periodically scan the device in the background looking for threats and eliminating them if found.Endpoint protection software on the other hand covers all the endpoints connected to a network, monitoring and analyzing them for any threats. One of the major differences, however, is that endpoint security software offers a sandboxing feature which allows teams to test programs in specifically created environments without disrupting actual workflows.

What Are Endpoint Devices?

Endpoint devices refer to hardware end-user devices such desktops, laptops, smartphones, servers, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices that allow users to access a corporate network. 98% of IoT traffic is unencrypted which makes a hacker’s job that much easier.

As technology advances, more organizations will begin adapting to the new interconnected and remote IoT world. This will also present more sophisticated threats and attacks not seen just yet. That’s the reason endpoint device security should remain at the top of any security checklist.

How Perimeter 81 Provides Next Level Endpoint Protection with Zero Trust

In addition to endpoint security tools and EDR software, companies looking to increase overall security should consider adapting to a Zero Trust approach to protect devices and remote employees from being the target of carefully planned endpoint attacks.

Perimeter 81’s Zero Trust framework enables customized permission-based policies for employees and provides secure access to the corporate network. Segment your network and grant user access on a need to know basis. See how our Zero Trust approach can transform your endpoint and network security.