Defending modern enterprises often requires advanced thinking and out-of-the-box solutions. In our experience, legacy security policies and implementations, such as outdated security tools, lack of visibility and/or a failure to protect the end user, are equally failing to adequately equip the information security team to perform their duties.

 

This leads to failure to mitigate or prevent intrusions that, by many accounts, could have been neutralized with a simple implementation. Think back over the past 24 months—multiple high-profile enterprise breaches have been traced to a single entry vector that could have been easily protected. We want to reverse this trend and change the way you see one of the most integral parts of your environment: the web browser. By far one of the most commonly used applications within any organization, browsers are often your users’ go-to tool for accessing resources such as webmail, the corporate intranet and external sites.

 

However, browsers are also one of the most common applications that threat actors use in the early stages of an intrusion. Furthermore, as organizations move various operations to the cloud, dependency on the browser is even more prevalent than before—thus, we are labeling the browser as the new endpoint. In this guide, we examine the concept of browser isolation and its potential role within modern organizations.

 

A relatively young concept within the information security world, browser isolation focuses on limiting the impact that a browser can have on a victim system. However, isolation itself is not new: Consider air-gapped networks, which have simply disallowed a connection as a security measure. This, however, is not sustainable in modern computing, which is connectivity- and cloud-dependent. Isolation has been somewhat cumbersome or computationally heavy, requiring significant resources per user to achieve any form of isolation success.

 

Discover how you can tackle cybersecurity challenges by downloading our All Roads Lead to the Browser: A SANS Buyer’s Guide to Browser Isolation