Background: Navigating a Shifting Financial Threat Landscape
A prominent Korean bank, managing sensitive customer data and thousands of endpoints across numerous branches, faced constant pressure to maintain airtight security. Their existing antivirus and perimeter defenses, however, proved insufficient against sophisticated, evolving cyber threats like fileless malware, APTs, and ransomware that exploited unknown vulnerabilities and spread laterally.
Seeking Proactive Endpoint Visibility and Actionable Control
The bank urgently needed a real-time solution to monitor, detect, and respond to threats at the endpoint level. Ensuring consistent policy enforcement across tens of thousands of distributed endpoints—including those in isolated internal networks and mixed-use environments—was critical. Their legacy tools lacked the granular visibility and actionable control required, leaving them vulnerable.
Solution: Genians EDR – A Natural Evolution from NAC Expertise
The bank sought an EDR solution that would integrate seamlessly into its layered security environment. After evaluating five EDRs, Genian EDR emerged as the clear choice, distinctively leveraging its foundational success in Network Access Control (NAC). Genians developed its EDR solution based on extensive NAC experience, directly responding to customer requests for enhanced endpoint security. This NAC-driven approach provided crucial advantages:
- Single-Agent Deployment & Operational Ease at Scale:
- One lightweight agent with EDR plugin capabilities now provides comprehensive NAC and EDR functionality, ensuring exceptional system stability and performance across thousands of endpoints, even at scale.
- Leveraged existing NAC deployment for seamless, simplified rollout, operating quietly with low memory usage (as low as 9–12MB) even in low-bandwidth branches.
- Crucially, this agent maintains full local detection and response capabilities even offline, essential for continuous protection in decentralized branch networks with varying connectivity.
- This plugin-based integration significantly minimized operational overhead and agent deployment efforts.
- Flexible Endpoint Tracking:
- Unlike competitors’ EDR tools that relied on cumbersome hostname-based endpoint tracking, Genian EDR provided flexible IP and MAC-based search.
- This simplified location and action on suspicious devices across branches, aligning perfectly with the bank’s IT operations.
- Dynamic Enforcement Through Combined Intelligence:
- Seamless integration allows NAC to enrich its understanding of endpoints with EDR’s real-time security status, threat levels, and behavioral history.
- NAC’s policy engine can then dynamically adjust network access policies based on these precise EDR insights.
- Rapid network-level response: EDR-detected anomalies or threats trigger immediate NAC blocking or quarantine at the network level.
- Vital for preventing threat propagation and aiding forensic analysis.
- EDR logs feed directly into SIEM for unified threat visibility and investigation.
Real-World Capabilities in Action: Enhanced Network Intelligence and Comprehensive Risk Management
Genian EDR delivered tangible real-world outcomes, demonstrating the powerful synergy of its integration with NAC:
- Ransomware Detected & Contained: EDR flagged anomalous behavior (e.g., document encryption, drive access, vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe execution) from ransomware. NAC automatically isolated the endpoint, preventing lateral spread and containing the threat at the network edge.
- Signed Malware Identified: EDR agents detected anomalous system behavior (e.g., .dll execution via rundll32) from malware that traditional antivirus missed, thwarting data exfiltration.
- Unauthorized Network Access Uncovered: The solution consistently detected PCs violating segmentation policies, allowing immediate remediation.
- Cryptojacking Malware Removed: Investigating anomalous traffic on one endpoint, Genian EDR uncovered and removed cryptojacking activity. This threat, dormant since 2019, had run undetected for years but was ultimately eliminated.
Summary: From Reactive to Proactive Defense with Integrated Endpoint Security
With Genian EDR, the bank moved from reactive incident response to proactive threat hunting and early intervention. The integrated power of Genian NAC and EDR ensures that endpoint intelligence drives network-level control, enabling rapid isolation of threats to prevent their spread and minimize damage before forensic analysis. Security events that would have previously gone unnoticed—such as unencrypted password transmissions, internal users bypassing DLP, or USB misuse—are now continuously monitored and investigated in real-time. Even their internal audit and compliance teams are leveraging EDR data for enhanced oversight.
Ultimately, the deployment of Genian EDR has been more than a security upgrade. It marked a strategic shift in how they manage endpoint risk—empowering their team to act before damage is done. The bank now has the assurance that its systems, data, and customers are better protected, no matter how advanced or persistent the threats become.
