For businesses, endpoints remain an important attack surface to harden for a few reasons:
- Ubiquity: Large companies have hundreds of thousands of endpoints dispersed across hundreds or thousands of locations. The risk is enormous because nearly all endpoints are connected to the internet.
- Diversity: A typical enterprise has thousands of applications in their global catalog, each endpoint can have a unique combination of applications, and the apps' configuration and usage can vary between machines.
- Exploitability: Attackers place most of their efforts on exploiting endpoints.
- Uncontrollability: End users can be trained – but not controlled; most malware still comes from an old-fashioned phishing ploy.