5 Ways Cloud-Based Endpoint Security Services Pose a Threat Businesses

In today’s age of digital evolution, businesses have more and more endpoints to protect. It is increasingly important for enterprises to have the right endpoint security to assist with malware detection and ransomware detection. While many vendors offer different types of solutions to help mitigate suspicious endpoint activity, cloud-based endpoint security services are becoming increasingly popular. However, there are many risks in using cloud-based services.

Top 5 Risks of Cloud-Based Endpoint Security Services

Unified Attack Point

Cloud-based endpoint security systems create a single entry-point for hackers. In a cloud-based system, there is susceptibility in applications where admins log into a web application to manage their workstations, emails and threats. If an attacker finds a vulnerability in this web application, they can gain access to the full spectrum of a company’s network, including company emails, workstations and many other areas of sensitivity.

Vendor Risk

Cloud-based endpoint security services create unnecessary vendor risk. Employees of the cloud hosting company can access sensitive information and, in some cases, gain access to all workstations in the company network. Earlier this year, a former AWS employee was arrested for stealing the social security and bank account information from millions of Capital One credit card applications. This data breach was executed through a method called a ‘ Server Side Request Forgery,’ an attack in which a server is tricked into executing unauthorized commands. This type of attack, experts note, is one of the biggest threats to organizations that use cloud-based endpoint security systems.

Time-Intensive

Efficiency and timeliness are incredibly important to every company’s bottom line. With cloud-based endpoint security solutions, companies frequently run into delays. These delays are the result of the large amount of time needed to redirect all executable samples, such as emails, to the cloud for analysis and the time needed to pass “clean” samples to the actual server.

Shared Data

Cloud-based endpoint security services send all endpoint data to the cloud for analysis, meaning one breach can expose the sensitive data of hundreds of companies to an attacker. After data is sent to the cloud, it is often shared with additional analysis engines and antivirus aggregators. Generally, this data is shared with these third-party vendors to help uncover vulnerabilities antivirus products may have failed to detect, or false positives these services reported. Sharing data with third-party vendors means company samples can be accessed by countless other antivirus vendors, exposing sensitive and proprietary company data.

DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) are another way cybercriminals infiltrate and infect cloud-based security solutions. DDoS attacks poison a network of computers with a virus that pesters the server with traffic until it fails due to the volume. One such example of a crippling DDoS attack involved Dyn, an enterprise that manages a significant portion of the Internet’s domain name system architecture. Since Dyn is such a large player in this space, when it was hit with a DDoS attack, websites such as Twitter, Netflix and Reddit were disabled. Even the biggest companies can fall victim to attacks of this nature.

In today’s day and age, it is important to have an endpoint security system that can recognize, learn about and block all suspicious and threatening activities. RevBits Endpoint Security was built by experienced developers, hackers and specialists to use behavioral analysis and machine learning to provide complete ransomware detection and malware detection with no signature, ensuring that businesses have no gaps or unnecessary risk in endpoint security.

Originally published at https://www.revbits.com.