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National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is now well underway, and this year’s theme is “Own IT. Secure IT. Protect IT.” The core message is simple: today’s businesses and consumers must take key proactive steps to ensure their online privacy and devices’ security. This means using strong passwords, taking advantage of multi-factor authentication (MFA), and understanding the risks of phishing attacks and social media-based scams. But most importantly, it means increasing your awareness of—and visibility into—what’s already on the devices you own.

The number of endpoint devices connecting to enterprise networks continues to climb rapidly. Not only are organizations issuing multiple devices to individual employees (for instance, both a tablet and laptop computer), but they’re also increasingly providing network connectivity to employee-owned devices as well as those of vendors, partners, and guests.

Yet the majority of successful data breaches begin with the compromise of an endpoint device. According to recent research from IDC and the Ponemon Institute, between two-thirds and 70% of data breaches might have been prevented with stronger endpoint security. The natural result of the rapid proliferation of connected devices is a larger attack surface, and thus, organizations face greater security risks.

One of the biggest challenges posed by the proliferation of connected devices is visibility. As ever-greater numbers of endpoints become part of business IT ecosystems, it’s increasingly difficult for security teams to see, understand, and control which files are stored or executed, which operating system actions initiated, or which IP addresses contacted from all of them at all times.

A single, simple tool allows you to see 100% of threats

Even as information security spending continues to climb, IT security teams remain constrained by limited resources. There simply aren’t enough skilled professionals available to meet businesses’ need for thorough monitoring of networks, endpoints, and Internet-facing applications. Tools that are streamlined and efficient to use and that enhance teams’ ability to see what’s taking place at the most vulnerable points in the IT environment can have a major impact in terms of risk reduction.

Legacy anti-malware solutions work by comparing each file on your system to a library of known malicious files. Any with signatures matching those of files on the blacklist are quarantined or removed from the device. But how many files currently stored or running on endpoint devices in your environment aren’t known to be malware, but can’t be definitively identified as safe, either?

Few of today’s IT leaders or CISOs can even begin to answer this question. Today’s IT environments are simply too complex, and endpoint devices contain billions of files of various and diverse origin. Yet any one of the unknown files residing on an endpoint device in your environment might bear the seeds of an attack that might ultimately cause millions of dollars in damage to the business.

Comodo Forensic Analysis Tool offers complete visibility for free

Now available for zero-cost, no-obligation download, the Comodo Forensic Analysis Tool will detect all known malicious files on any Windows endpoint device. It will also tell you how many known safe files are present, and it will give an accurate count of the unknown files residing there. In essence, it gives you full and comprehensive visibility into that endpoint’s risk profile—in quantitative terms—and does so quickly and easily. All files on the system in question, as well as associated active directory, network addresses and user workgroups will be analyzed, with quick scan results returned in less than ten minutes.

Running the Forensic Analysis Tool is a simple step, but it’s also a way of beginning to address a complex problem—visibility into the ever-growing numbers of connected endpoints in today’s IT environments.

You can download the tool and get full results today, or contact us to learn more about today’s most advanced endpoint security solutions.

TEST YOUR EMAIL SECURITY GET YOUR INSTANT SECURITY SCORECARD FOR FREE Source: https://blog.comodo.com/comodo-news/forensic-analysis-tools/