In modern corporate IT environments that rely on cloud connectivity, global connectivity, and large amounts of data, the browser has become the most important work interface. The browser connects employees to her managed resources, devices to her web, and on-premises environments to cloud environments.
But perhaps unsurprisingly, this prominence of the browser has significantly increased the number of threats targeting it for attackers. The attacker is currently leveraging the core functionality of the browser (rendering and executing her web pages that the user visits) to carry out the attack. The browser is now both an attack surface and an attack vector for malicious access to the company’s SaaS and web applications through account takeover and use of compromised credentials.
A new guide was recently published to address this issue (Download here). Analyze what a solution to these threats would be. The guide “Protecting Against Web-borne Threats Starts With Browser Security Platform” details the characteristics and capabilities of potential solutions, compares them to other security solutions, and explains why you need them.
You cannot protect against web-borne risks outside your browser
Commonly used security solutions were not natively built to protect web sessions. for example:
- Network solutions that analyze web traffic to prevent access to malicious websites fail to detect more than 40% of today’s attacker-controlled web pages.
- CASB does not have monitoring and threat detection capabilities for unapproved applications or other non-corporate web destinations.
- The Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) has no visibility into browser extension installations.
Instead, protection against web-borne risks should come from the browser itself.
Solution: Browser Security Platform
This guide seeks awareness of the Browser Security Platform, a new security solution category that provides visibility into the browser’s application layer. This visibility is provided by continuously monitoring, analyzing, and enforcing real-time security controls over browser sessions from the browser itself.
Key features of Browser Security Platform are:
- browser independent – Ability to equally support all browsers you may encounter.
- Converged – Ability to analyze post-decryption web sessions, detect and prevent web-borne attacks in real-time, prevent unintended data loss, and enable IT governance.
- comprehensive – Addresses all aspects of browser security: prevention of the browser itself, user activity, and attacker-controlled web pages.
- Deep web session inspection – Real-time monitoring, risk analysis and proactive protection for the web session itself after the actual decryption.
- User-centric – Maintain a seamless user experience and protect user privacy.
Core Features of a Browser Security Platform
Following the detailed characteristics, this guide lists the core features of the browser security platform. The main ones are:
- Secure browser configuration and reduced attack surface
- Browser Zero Trust
- 360° SaaS and web security
- Protection from browser attacks, phishing web pages, and malicious websites
- Secure unmanaged devices and BYOD
Adapt and respond to future web-based risks.
The guide itself provides more in-depth details on each feature and how businesses can take advantage of them.
Benefits of a browser security platform
Why should businesses consider a browser security platform? Our guide doesn’t hesitate to tackle the tough questions. The author knows that the CISO must justify the budget to the board and evangelize it internally. That’s why we list the key benefits that the Browser Security Platform offers enterprises.
Chief among them is flexibility in how employees work, consolidation of browser security controls, regaining control of unmanaged resources, consistent protection across all web and SaaS applications, and support for a cloud-first strategy.
What is Browser Security Platform?
Finally, this guide provides some insight on how to detect the Browser Security Platform. As an evolving category, the Browser Security Platform concept is not always well understood by both security practitioners and solution vendors.
A common mistake about the nature of this new product category is to perceive it as a virtual machine for web page emulation, an enhancer for endpoint protection solutions, or a replacement solution for commercial browsers. Instead, the guide explains in detail why.
Highlights of the Browser Security Platform Guide
Your journey to protect against web-borne risks and threats began a long time ago. The question to explore today is where are the most pressing gaps? It could be partial visibility across unauthorized applications or failure to prevent employees from accessing malicious web pages. Browser protection presents many challenges.
The Browser Security Platform guide provides guidance for security practitioners to identify how to address these gaps. Our own guide details how the solution works and which stakeholders will benefit.
read Full guide here.
