The Growing Risk of Unmanaged Devices
Over the past few years, enterprise security managers have rapidly adopted Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems. These systems are great, as they provide continuous monitoring of managed devices. They alert when an endpoint has been compromised, provide historical information about how the attack occurred, and help you respond to the incident.
Unfortunately, traditional EDR systems don’t work on unmanaged devices which can’t accommodate security agents. Unmanaged devices are used throughout businesses today, from industrial control systems to PLCs in industrial environments to medical devices in hospitals to all the new smart connected devices in corporate environments.
These unmanaged devices have embedded operating systems (Linux, Windows, Android, VxWorks and more) that can’t easily be patched. Over time they can accumulate a large number of vulnerabilities. Once compromised, an unmanaged device can do as much damage as a compromised computer, if not more—it can be leveraged as part of a kill chain, it can disrupt your operations, and even threaten human safety.