Endpoints Are Too Easily Compromised

The Information Security team at any modern enterprise is acutely aware of the ever-present and increasingly sophisticated threats posed by hackers and rogue actors. As cyber warfare is widely recognised as a powerful political tool, the allocation of support by some governments towards state sponsored hacking activities is now immense. The challenge faced by organisations today in trying to protect their information, intellectual property and clients from cyber malfeasance is incredibly daunting. Hence the complex cyber security ecosystems that most enterprises currently leverage to - protect their endpoints from 5^th generation cyber attacks.

Cyber attacks take many forms and target many different points of entry. However what has become recognised as a soft underbelly for cyber attackers is the endpoint. According to the IDC around 70% of successful breaches actually originate from the endpoint – a staggering figure when viewed in isolation. When taken in the context of the complex mix of tools that comprise a typical enterprise cyber security architecture, and combined with the persistent use of external and internal vulnerability assessments, that 70% figure is even more perplexing. 

So how do these endpoints continue to be breached easily, despite the cyber security tools already deployed?

The Windows Group Policy architecture is widely used across enterprises to provide structure and consistency to the configuration of endpoints. Importantly, Group Policy is depended upon to control a host of different key security parameters on endpoints. Yet current toolsets do not audit endpoints for vulnerabilities derived from Group Policy. Instead, most organisations presume that their configuration is fully secure and that the configuration is being successfully applied to endpoints. That’s a risky strategy indeed and one truly appreciated by hackers.

Gytpol Validator is an innovative cyber security platform which has been specifically developed to identify commonly exploitable vulnerabilities across endpoints – in a way that no other tools in the market currently do.  Its uniqueness is born very much from its creator’s background in both the military, and as she now calls herself, as a former hacker.

Amongst those organisations that have already deployed Gytpol Validator, approximately 90% of their endpoints are found to have vulnerabilities on the first scan of their estate – the majority of which were yet to be discovered. Gytpol is both a revelation and a wake up call for the companies that have deployed it. On initial scan, Information Security teams are quickly made aware of a broad spectrum of exploitable holes in their endpoint security which no other tools have identified. These are the same holes that hackers actively target because of a serious historic blind spot in vulnerability scanning tools.

Gytpol Knows What You Don't Know

Unlike the other formats typically utilised for vulnerability scanning, Gytpol Validator is able to provide companies with real time insights into their endpoints. The ability to continually poll your endpoints for vulnerabilities and assess the effectiveness of remedial measures implemented, is an extremely powerful capability for any enterprise information security team – which has traditionally relied on old data views. While half the challenge in cyber security is finding a vulnerability before a rogue party does, determining the most appropriate remedial measures can equally be a time-consuming process – which places an overhead on internal stakeholders. In addition to highlighting endpoint vulnerabilities, the Gypol Validator console provides in-app guidance on the remedial measures required to address each of them.

The guidance itself forms a simple, step-by-step guide to rectifying security vulnerabilities on endpoints – in a singular or estate wide context. Impressively, future releases of Gytpol Validator will enable vulnerabilities to be rectified in an automated fashion, across all endpoints, drastically reducing the overhead on Information Security teams and IT Administrators.

Compliance Against Industry Standards
Adding to the Gytpol Validator value proposition for enterprises is its ability to audit the endpoints across an estate accurately, for compliance against key regulatory, quality and information security standards. These standards include many of those currently coveted by industry; GDPR, SOX, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, CIS, NIST and HIPAA – enabling companies to reduce the time and overhead involved in both demonstrating and securing a statement of compliance.

Integration with SIEM Solutions
Centralised Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are increasingly common in enterprises and Gytpol Validator very much supports this method of cohesive analysis of security events - generated by disparate systems. Gytpol plugs into all of the industry standard SIEM solutions and is able capture, retain, and deliver security information and events to your SIEM app in real-time. Users of SIEM applications will benefit greatly by combining the additional dimension of Gytpol output with other information from traditional security tools - to create richer, more meaningful data sets.