Proactive Endpoint Protection: Morphisec Guard Secures Your Company

Defending your critical infrastructure against cyber threats has never been harder. Adversaries constantly innovate new techniques to exfiltrate or encrypt data, forcing defenders to play a cybersecurity version of “whack-a-mole” in their attempts to ameliorate any possible damage.

In keeping with this state of affairs, prevailing cybersecurity investment has focused on detection and response platforms out of a belief that prevention has failed and all new security spend needs to be shifted to detection and response. This is a dangerous approach, as even the best detection solution still leaves adversaries with a window of opportunity.

No matter how good your mean time to remediate/respond is, it’s never zero, which ultimately means you’re at risk. This risk could be substantial from an economic perspective, as the average cost of an endpoint security breach increased to $8.94 million in 2019, and the average time to patch an endpoint is 97 days according to Ponemon Institute research.

While prevention has failed us in the past, it doesn't mean we can stop innovating in this critical defense layer. One innovation that ends the perpetual game of "cyber-whack-a-mole" is proactive endpoint prevention, and it’s the philosophical underpinning of our new proactive endpoint protection solution: Morphisec Guard.

Morphisec Guard: Proactive Endpoint Protection

Morphisec Guard is built on the idea of proactive cyber defense. This contrasts with traditional reactive prevention, such as signatures, machine learning, behavioral analytics, sandboxing, etc., which need to experience a new adversary technique or malware before they can prevent it.

Proactive cyber defense doesn’t wait for new techniques to appear; rather, it’s about getting ahead of new threats by hardening existing defenses against future attacks without worrying about what the new attack will be. The goal is to ensure that your critical infrastructure is protected from file-based malware and fileless attacks, including those that operate in-memory and often bypass traditional antivirus platforms.

This proactive hardening needs to be accomplished without being cost-prohibitive. As Morphisec Guard leverages Windows’ native security measures, it is affordable for any size business to enact a proactive cyber defense strategy.

This is incredibly important because it’s no longer only large businesses that experience advanced attacks -- adversaries increasingly cast a wide net and target small and midsized organizations as well. As such, Guard provides a lower total cost of ownership to gain advanced protections because we don’t ask you to pay for features that are already built into the operating system.

Morphisec Guard accomplishes its goal in two ways: leveraging the leading antivirus protection solutions that are built into Windows 10 -- like Windows Defender AV, Windows Firewall, and other components -- and through the moving target defense technology that Morphisec pioneered.

Moving target defense works through morphing application memory, allowing legitimate use to flow to a morphed location and making it impossible for attackers to identify their target application. With this dual methodology, Morphisec Guard is a full endpoint protection platform designed to secure all in-house and remote endpoints against any form of cyberattack.

Ultimately, this allows Morphisec to provide a best-of-breed, proactive endpoint protection solution. We fully leverage the leading antivirus for known attacks, including adding needed visibility into Windows Defender AV attacks for corporate use, as well as the best moving target defense technology to prevent unknown, in-memory exploits.

The Benefits of Morphisec Guard

Morphisec Guard’s proactive, prevention-first model of endpoint protection is designed to save organizations time and money through a few different avenues, including:

• No false positives -- One of the biggest time sinks for IT teams is investigating security alerts for potential false positives; the average detection-focused solution generates an average of 10,000 alerts that require investigation. The proactive, prevention-first moving target defense technology of Morphisec Guard does not generate alerts that need to be investigated. Instead, it deterministically blocks attacks and then provides details on what was blocked. This saves substantial IT staff time.
• Full protection even when offline -- Morphisec Guard does not need an internet connection to protect your endpoints against attack. Because it doesn’t require telemetry data sent back to a detection and response management portal, Morphisec Guard can block attacks in an online and offline environment.
• No remediation needed -- When an attack is prevented with Morphisec Guard, there’s no need for a remediation tool because there’s nothing to remediate. Since there is nothing to remediate, there’s also nothing to file with regulatory authorities in terms of responsible disclosure or notify customers that their data may have been compromised.

Morphisec Guard fully protects virtual and physical Windows endpoints, while saving staff time and money because of its deterministic prevention strategy. With no updates needed, no false positives, and no need for an internet connection, enterprises can be confident that their employees will be protected no matter where they are.

Morphisec Guard, built on Morphisec’s moving target defense technology, deterministically secures your critical infrastructure against the worst cyberattacks. It’s cloud-delivered and able to be managed via the cloud as well, ensuring that your IT team can centrally manage solution deployment as well as create reports about attacks prevented throughout the enterprise.

With this launch of Morphisec Guard for proactive endpoint protection -- and Morphisec Shield for proactive threat prevention -- we are working to change the modern security paradigm from one of detection and response to one of prevention-first. After all, as Ben Franklin once wrote, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”