Illumio announced Illumio Edge, a first-of-its kind Zero Trust endpoint protection solution that dramatically reduces the risk of ransomware and malware propagating laterally throughout an organization. Fully managed in the cloud, customers can enable this new offering either via a lightweight Illumio agent or, through a partnership with CrowdStrike Inc., via an existing CrowdStrike Falcon agent. By making every endpoint a Zero Trust endpoint, organizations can better secure users as they now work from anywhere. 

According to leading global research and advisory firm Forrester, "Entire industries have been affected and, in some cases, ground to a halt thanks to the scourge of ransomware attacks. While endpoint-focused security solutions have evolved, ransomware continues to impact enterprises... Worms such as WannaCry and NotPetya rely on lateral movement to escalate a containable nuisance to a cataclysmic attack. Microsegmentation and focused granular internal controls mitigate this problem and must be deployed as part of a Zero Trust strategy."

As the world adjusts to the ‘new normal' of work-from-anywhere, the threat landscape has widened as attackers target unsuspecting employees on laptops to gain an initial compromise, and then move laterally to reach an intended target within an organization. This makes effective endpoint protection more important than ever before. While most existing endpoint security tools focus on initial threat prevention of malware or its subsequent detection and response, Illumio Edge goes beyond traditional endpoint security tools to prevent the spread of malware and ransomware after an initial compromise. 

Illumio Edge delivers containment by default to significantly reduce an organization's attack surface. This solution makes every endpoint a Zero Trust endpoint, blocking all unnecessary inbound network communications to greatly reduce the risk of malware spreading peer to peer without the fear of false positives. By pairing malware detection from Next-Generation Anti-Virus (NGAV) or Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions with Illumio's endpoint Zero Trust, organizations can not only stop known malware, but also block zero-day threats and unknown malware by preventing lateral movement between endpoints.

"As organizations were forced to transform overnight to allow for remote work, a host of endpoint security issues that have either been ignored or invisible until now were brought to the forefront," said Andrew Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Illumio. "We built Illumio on an innovative, forward-thinking foundation and have been listening to our customers' requests for a better solution to combat lateral movement on the endpoint. We believe Illumio Edge is a fundamental shift to strengthen cybersecurity practices for organizations of all sizes, and we're excited to partner with an innovative leader like CrowdStrike to bring this to market at mass scale today."

This new offering starts with a simple workflow to create automated, risk-free allow lists for detected services. With policy in place, simple enforcement follows the laptop wherever it goes - on and off the network. Not only is it easy to put enforcement in place, Illumio Edge is invisible to employees, meaning it will not harm system performance, and IT teams can rest easy knowing there will be no new unnecessary IT tickets.

Illumio Edge is cloud delivered with a lightweight agent that runs on endpoints. The company is also announcing today a partnership and integration with CrowdStrike, a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection. CrowdStrike customers will be able to use their existing Falcon agent to enable Illumio Edge, with no additional software deployments required. Illumio Edge will be available in the CrowdStrike Store in July.

"We are proud to add Illumio to our growing CrowdStrike Store ecosystem. CrowdStrike customers can further maximize their investment in the CrowdStrike Falcon platform by leveraging Illumio Edge to further fortify their organizations against the lateral movement of malware without the need for any additional agents," said Michael Sentonas, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike. "Illumio Edge combined with CrowdStrike's instant visibility and protection across the enterprise will bring Zero Trust to every endpoint regardless of location and will offer our customers the most complete threat prevention capabilities, all seamlessly accessible through the CrowdStrike Falcon platform."