Cybersecurity incidents can have operational, financial, reputational, and strategic consequences for you and your customers, all of which come at significant costs. Security misconfigurations and software vulnerabilities are often the root cause of these incidents, which leave the door open for cybercriminals to exploit these weaknesses.
As the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, traditional endpoint security solutions cannot keep up. Some tools are configured by default or misconfigured, creating security risks frequently introduced through human error.
Common challenges that lead SMBs to security risks
- Not keeping up with patches: Outdated software can leave systems exposed to known vulnerabilities that may have already been patched. To ensure patches are effective, they must be applied on time. Otherwise, hackers will take advantage of vulnerabilities.
- Security misconfigurations: Attackers are actively looking for holes in security to sneak into the systems. To be truly effective, protection settings must be properly configured and enabled to avoid hackers exploiting setting weaknesses
- Lack of visibility into indicators of attack (IoAs): In living-off-the-land (LotL) attacks, intruders use legitimate software or tools available in the victim's system to perform malicious actions. Implement a security solution that includes anomalous behavioral analysis and detection of IoAs.
- Accidentally leaving unprotected endpoints: A cybercriminal only needs one device to compromise the security of the whole organization. Deploy a modern endpoint security solution in every single system to reduce the attack surface. Protection is only as strong as its weakest link.
Help your clients to mitigate the impact of security risks on endpoints
Cyber risk can have a direct impact on customer systems if its endpoint solution is not properly configured. This makes existing protection measures less effective, forcing them to assess their security posture continuously, and this is not always possible. So, how can MSPs help SMB clients to monitor and control emerging security incidents?
IT security experts need to understand clients’ cyber threat risk posture and reinforce security solution controls so they can prevent and minimize the chances of infection disrupting their business. Enable risk monitoring to strengthen your managed security service delivery to discover vulnerabilities and security configuration weaknesses across endpoints in the customer infrastructure, which can significantly reduce the attack surface.
Moreover, managing and monitoring clients’ unprotected endpoints, indicators of attack, security misconfigurations, OS and third-party software vulnerabilities, and missing patches will provide them the following benefits to proactively safeguard an IT environment before a breach can occur.
- Monitor risk constantly to strengthen cybersecurity posture and mitigate the risk.
- Discover laptops, computers, and servers with unpatched vulnerabilities that could be exploited.
- Gain visibility into customer protection status across endpoints and understand their risk level.
- Decrease end user incidents by identifying risks and addressing them immediately, making the security posture more efficient.
As hackers are actively trying to find the weakest points in any system, it is crucial for end users to reduce the risk level in every computer. At the same time, we find that some customers don’t have the time, enough skills, or resources to do it, so this is an excellent opportunity for MSPs that provides endpoint protection detection and response capabilities. MSPs can complement their managed services with a health risk assessment to add real value to their security offering. By providing an endpoint risk monitoring service, MSPs minimize the impact of cybersecurity risks so SMBs will not need an in-house team ‒ saving time and costs and reducing resource burdens.
Carlos Arnal is product marketing manager at WatchGuard Technologies. Read more WatchGuard guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of ChannelE2E’s sponsorship program.
