As enterprises enter a new year of opportunity with the arrival of 2015, optimism for continuing growth and profitability are understandably tempered by an ever-changing threat landscape. As both user awareness and protection technologies increase in sophistication, attackers are being forced to become ever more efficient – instead of the ‘spray and pray’ approach of the past, where they targeted as many people as possible in a company and hoped someone might fall for their spear phishing assaults, they have now switched to ‘low and slow’ attack methods. This has made them increasingly efficient and quieter at what they do, while prolonging the timeframe for attacks. In effect, they have become more silent – and deadly – assassins.
Symantec empowers enterprises to fight back against such highly sophisticated attacks by building proactive protection into Symantec Endpoint Protection. This proactive protection is powered by the Symantec Data Analytics Platform where we import all of our raw features – enormous volumes of data about security events, web site details, etc., adding 55k rows every second. In effect, the platform represents an ‘Interpol system’ for all of our technologies, all in one place. Inside that platform, we run predictive analytics applications, the output being intelligence that we can build into products or share with customers directly. For example, File Insight uses complex machine learning to decide whether files are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, based on hygiene and dozens of other variables; URL insight does exactly the same.
With 7 billion File, URL & IP classifications capturing previously unseen threats and attack methods, and 1 billion devices protected, this greater visibility creates better context and deeper insight, delivering proactive protection constantly to enterprises globally.
These protections are created by Symantec’s Security Technology and Response (STAR) organization. They are a worldwide team of security engineers, threat analysts and researchers, which includes Security Response, that provides the underlying functionality content and support for all Symantec corporate and consumer security products. With Response centers located throughout the world, STAR monitors malicious code reports from more than 130 million systems across the Internet, receives data from 240,000 network sensors in more than 200 countries and tracks more than 25,000 vulnerabilities affecting more than 55,000 technologies from more than 8,000 vendors. The team uses this vast intelligence to develop and deliver the world’s most comprehensive security protection.
Together, they have created our core protection technologies which address endpoint protection in five areas: file, network, behavior, reputation and remediation. By collaborating, each technology is able to operate more efficiently and more effectively to determine whether a given situation is malicious or not. As each technology learns different attributes about a process or a file, it will share what it learns with the other technologies. For example, the network-based protection technologies are able to track where web-downloaded files originate and share this information with the other technologies. All of these technologies come with Symantec Endpoint Protection and do not require separate licenses or pricing.
Some years ago, traditional antivirus technologies were all that was needed to protect an endpoint from attack – but now things have changed beyond all recognition. Antivirus-based technologies alone are no longer sufficient. A continued reliance on what was once regarded as ‘state of the art’ will almost certainly lead to breaches and a lack of the necessary intelligence to ward off and/or identify potential breaches. Securing the endpoint and an enterprise’s data has gravitated to new levels of sophistication. Happily, this technology is within your grasp.