Attivo Networks EDN enhancements prevent attackers from fingerprinting an endpoint

Attivo Networks introduced new capabilities to its Endpoint Detection Net (EDN) solution that prevent attackers from fingerprinting an endpoint to identify security weaknesses and from conducting reconnaissance.

Attackers use fingerprinting to identify targets, decide which vulnerabilities to exploit, and determine how to successfully interact with them. Unlike traditional security solutions, these new capabilities proactively redirect suspicious endpoint inbound or outbound traffic to decoys for attacker engagement.

The new EDN Deflect functionality provides alerts to unauthorized host and service scanning, which is critical because other security controls typically do not generate an alert for these types of activities.

Attempts by attackers to fingerprint an endpoint are regularly missed due to the complexity of tracking, analyzing, and alerting on all of an endpoint’s communications traffic. These new deflection capabilities efficiently and accurately detect network and application fingerprinting as well as lateral movement, closing one more attack vector that threat actors are increasingly leveraging.

When attackers successfully breach an endpoint and get a foothold inside a network (known as “breakout time” and estimated to average just under nine hours), they spread to other systems by probing for open ports and fingerprinting network services.

Furthermore, research shows that only 4% of reconnaissance activity generates an alert, and security controls miss 54% of techniques used to test lateral movement detection.

The EDN solution, with its new Deflect function, identifies these connection and reconnaissance attempts and isolates the attacker by redirecting them to decoys for engagement, without interfering with production services or ports.

“The EDN Deflect feature increases the resistance in the network by preventing an attacker from moving laterally and fingerprinting network and application services,” said Venu Vissamsetty, vice president of security research, Attivo Networks.

“By detecting unauthorized ingress and egress connections both at the source and at the destination, security defenders gain real-time visibility along with conclusive detection alerts.”

Attackers fingerprint target hosts by probing for open ports they can attack (HTTP/HTTPS, remote desktop, SSH, MSSQL, etc.), and then either run exploits against their vulnerabilities or find misconfigurations or weak passwords to compromise them. The Attivo Deflect function gives power back to the defender by:

• Redirecting attackers scanning closed ports on protected hosts to decoys for engagement
• Redirecting failed outbound connections from protected endpoints to decoys for engagement
• Making every endpoint a trap and preventing fingerprinting of network services
• Providing real-time visibility and conclusive detection into every attack before it moves off an endpoint
• Providing active detection and prevention capabilities at both the source and destination
• Isolating and investigating suspicious endpoints without external tools