Organizations spend millions of dollars per year on cybersecurity, employ teams of analysts and implement hardened defenses across a dynamic and rapidly expanding threat surface. And yet, all that can be undone by a single, misplaced click. According to the latest Verizon Data Breach Incident Report, 68% of breaches are the result of a human error in judgment. This increasingly involves phishing – a type of attack that tricks an unsuspecting user into taking a harmful action that gives malicious actors access to critical business systems. Users, and their tendency to trust and click with impunity, are often the weakest link in an organization’s cybersecurity strategy.
We all know the risk well-meaning, unsuspecting users pose to business resiliency and the importance of building a culture of cybersecurity awareness across the organization. In fact, November is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a time dedicated to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity. Celebrated since 2004, the collaborative effort between government and industry seeks to encourage the public to think about how they can reduce online risk. This year’s theme, “Secure Our World” recognizes the importance of taking daily action to reduce risks when online and using connected devices.
Browser security sits on the front lines of cybersecurity awareness. More than 80% of workers’ days are now spent in the browser – accessing web applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, online portals and informative websites – and threat actors have decidedly shifted focus to web browsers as the point of entry to gain initial access to enterprise networks. Building awareness among users of the risk of phishing attacks starts with securing the browser, the gateway to our digital lives.
Browser-based phishing attacks are a danger
Phishing attacks continue to increase in volume and sophistication. According to Menlo Security’s 2023 State of Browser Security Report, the number of phishing attacks increased nearly 200% in the second half of 2023 compared to the first half of the year, and nearly a third of today’s phishing attacks use evasive techniques designed to get around traditional security controls by disguising malicious activity as legitimate traffic. This includes legitimate looking emails, text messages, in-app messaging or artificial intelligence (AI) generated voice messages that direct users to visit a malicious website, download a malicious file or take some other harmful action that seems to be authorized by a recognized entity. These evasive browser-based techniques include SMS phishing (smishing), Adversary in the Middle (AITM) frameworks, image-based phishing, brand impersonation or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) bypass.
Unfortunately, traditional security solutions such as URL filtering and antimalware tools are ill equipped to protect organizations from these evasive browser-based phishing attacks. They were designed decades ago to focus on protecting a hardened perimeter that kept malicious traffic outside the data center and off end devices by looking for signatures from previous attacks. However, as digital transformation, modern application architecture (microservices) and new work from anywhere policies became normal and evasive techniques have become easier to create, deploy and scale, malicious actors have been able to penetrate expanding threat surfaces at an increasing rate.
Successful phishing attacks can be a disaster for today’s organizations. All it takes is a single click inside the browser for a malicious actor to gain access to the end device or application. From there, they can lay in wait, probe the network, spread to other systems and eventually deliver their payload that allows them to take over critical systems, shut them down, exfiltrate proprietary data and demand ransom. This can lead to business disruption through unplanned downtime, eroded trust from customers and financial hits from lost revenue, remediation efforts and regulatory penalties.
Implementing browser security
Organizations can close this gap and better protect the organization from phishing attacks by layering browser security on top of their existing security stack. A secure enterprise browser solution acts as the key defense against browser-based phishing attacks, proactively identifying and blocking any attempt to get users to take malicious actions against their best interests.
Here are six benefits of implementing browser security solution for your organization:
1. Real-time threat prevention
Evasive attacks are also highly adaptive, able to be tweaked or customized at an incredible scale. This lack of signature makes it extremely difficult for signature-based web security solutions to identify attacks in real time. Your secure enterprise browser should include browser intelligence that is able to analyze browser data inside the rendered browser session, use computer vision to correlate legitimate traffic with your URLs and take immediate action to either block malicious content or render it in read-only mode. This AI-based approach shrinks exposure windows down to zero, preventing even the latest, most sophisticated phishing attempts from putting your users at risk.
2. Better user experience
Eliminating the risk from browser-based phishing attacks allows your users to go about their day completing their responsibilities. They don’t have to stop to worry whether a request from their boss is legitimate or whether a communication from a third-party application is real. They can click with impunity and get things done quickly, efficiently and risk free. It’s also important to ensure the native user experience. Forcing someone to download and use a new browser or install an extension can create dangerous workarounds or non-compliance. Similarly, blocking common browser functions such as copy/paste and print can make things difficult for your users and impact their productivity in both the long and short term.
3. Simplified deployment
The hardiest, most robust browser security solution can’t protect you if it’s not implemented consistently across your organization. Asking users to take an additional step to comply with browser security policies – such as install an extention or update software with a critical patch – is putting too much trust in your users who – after all – are not trained cybersecurity professionals. Instead, deployment should be clientless, automatically applied to anyone attempting to connect to enterprise tools and information – regardless of whether they are logging in from the office, home or a customer site or on a managed or unmanaged device. Coverage should be universal without putting the onus on the end user to maintain compliance.
4. End-to-end visibility
Minutes count when an attack hits, and you likely don’t have time to gather clues from distributed security tools scattered across your network. Your secure enterprise browser should provide advanced forensics into every browser session, allowing you to access session recordings, including user keystrokes, to easily gather the intelligence you need to investigate security events quickly and completely. End-to-end visibility speeds diagnosis and remediation – ensuring you can learn from events and close security gaps before they are exploited again.
5. Dynamic policy enforcement
Your secure enterprise browser should automatically route all traffic – whether it is known as malicious or not – through a secure browser in the cloud. This Zero Trust approach allows you to apply dynamic policy enforcement consistently on all traffic far from the end browser where malicious content can take hold and eventually spread. Dynamic policy enforcement in the cloud simplifies security operations and enables seamless application access for users without interrupting existing workflows or degrading productivity and performance.
6. Integration with existing security infrastructure
Most importantly, your secure enterprise browser should work within your existing cybersecurity apparatus through seamless integration and APIs. Connecting disparate security tools in a single security stack provides a consolidated view of security information that makes it easy to identify, diagnose and remediate incidents quickly and efficiently. Your secure enterprise browser solution shouldn’t add IT overhead for your staff or require constant configuration and management. Instead, it should enable reliable and fast, yet secure, access to the information and tools your users need to get the job done.
Now is the time to act on browser security
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a good time to implement browser security across your organization. Menlo Security allows you to do this seamlessly and non-disruptively by transforming any browser into a secure enterprise browser. The Menlo Secure Cloud Browser provides end-to-end visibility into and control over any content delivered through the browser, isolating it in a secure browser in the cloud. This ensures consistency of security policy enforcement and prevents malicious content from reaching the end device without impacting the native user experience or requiring additional maintenance from users.
Learn more by downloading the 2023 State of Browser Security Report from Menlo Security.
