Check Point and Palo Alto

What is the Control Point?

Check Point Harmony Endpoint (formerly SandBlast Agent) is a comprehensive endpoint security solution that prevents imminent threats such as ransomware, phishing, and drive-by malware, while reducing the impact of attacks through autonomous detection and response. Harmony Endpoint protects the remote workforce from today's changing threat landscape.

What is Palo Alto?

Palo Alto Networks Traps is an endpoint solution that prevents and responds to threats to ensure cyberattacks fail by coordinating law enforcement with network and cloud security. It combines effective endpoint protection technology with vital EDR capabilities in a single agent. By monitoring attack techniques and behaviors, Palo Alto blocks known and unknown exploits, malware, and ransomware.

Please note that Palo Alto Networks support for Traps ended in March 2022. Traps is currently part of Cortex XDR. A step-by-step guide on how to migrate from Traps Endpoint Security Manager to Cortex XDR is available.

Check Point vs Palo Alto: Feature Comparison

Head to Head Comparison: Check Point vs Palo Alto

Ransomware and malware prevention

Check Point prevents malware from reaching the terminal through web browsing and email attachments without affecting user productivity. Every file received goes through Check Point's Threat Emulation sandbox for malware inspection. Check Point's threat extraction process uses content reconstruction and disassembly technology to disinfect files in milliseconds. Check Point also automatically restores ransomware-encrypted files from snapshots to maintain business continuity and productivity and keep ransomware variants at bay.

SEE: Password breaches: Why pop culture and passwords don't mix (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Palo Alto also offers solutions against malware and ransomware. Reduces the attack surface to improve the accuracy of malware and ransomware protection by preventing malicious executables, DLLs, and Office macros. This approach mitigates endpoint infections caused by known and unknown malware.

Palo Alto uses machine learning to perform local analysis of file characteristics through Cortex XDR. It examines hundreds of features without relying on prior threat knowledge to provide immediate verdicts before handling threats. It also integrates its next-generation antivirus with its WildFire malware prevention service to analyze files and coordinate protection across all Palo Alto security products.

Unknown files are examined by WildFire inspection and analysis. WildFire uses dynamic, static, and basic analysis to provide comprehensive, evasion-resistant threat identification. Scans and repairs inactive malicious files without opening them.

Block fileless exploits and attacks

Exploit attacks take advantage of system vulnerabilities to hijack or steal resources and data. Check Point's Anti-Exploit feature prevents legitimate applications from being compromised and having their vulnerabilities exploited by protecting them from exploit-based attacks. Detects unknown and zero-day attacks. Anti-Exploit identifies questionable memory manipulations at runtime to uncover exploits. When it detects an exploited process, it repairs the entire attack chain.

Palo Alto focuses on blocking exploit techniques in an attack rather than individual attacks. Threats are rendered ineffective by blocking exploitation techniques at every step of an exploitation attempt, ultimately breaking the attack lifecycle. Palo Alto uses pre-exploitation protection to block vulnerability reconnaissance and profiling methods that precede exploit attacks to prevent attacks.

Palo Alto implements exploit prevention based on techniques for zero-day exploits to thwart attack techniques to manipulate legitimate applications. It also implements kernel exploit prevention to prevent exploits that target operating system vulnerabilities to design privileged processes at the system level. Attackers also attempt to load and execute malicious code from the kernel using injection techniques similar to the WannaCry attack; Kernel exploit prevention prevents these injection techniques.

The Cortex XDR Agent offers a comprehensive set of exploit protection modules to stop exploits that cause malware infections. An AI-powered adaptive local analysis engine that constantly learns to counter newly discovered attack techniques examines each file.

Behavior-based protection

Check Point Behavioral Guard takes an adaptive approach to detecting and blocking malware mutations. Blocking occurs based on the behavior of mutations in real time. Blocking malware mutations, along with their identification and classification, is also based on similarities between minimal process execution trees.

Harmony Endpoint Anti-Bot protection is part of Check Point's behavioral protection. Check Point Endpoint Anti-Bot component prevents bot threats to ensure users are safe from denial of service attacks and data theft, while ensuring their productivity is not affected by irregular bandwidth consumption. band. Use the ThreatCloud repository to classify bots and viruses, as it has more than 250 million addresses previously analyzed for bot discovery. Check Point also uses behavioral protection to detect and prevent ransomware.

Palo Alto Networks deploys its Behavioral Threat Protection Engine to detect and stop attack activity. Monitors malicious events in all processes and terminates detected attacks. It uses granular child process protection to block fileless and script-based attacks that generate malware. Because child processes can be used to bypass traditional security, granular child process protection prevents known processes from starting multiple child processes.

Cortex XDR compares past behavior and the behavior of its peers to detect anomalies and expose malicious activity. Uses behavioral analytics to identify unknown and elusive threats targeting networks. Palo Alto uses artificial intelligence and machine learning models to expose threats from any source, including managed and unmanaged devices.

Choosing between Check Point and Palo Alto

While Check Point offers a modern endpoint solution that is part of a broad, integrated product portfolio, its range of attack surface reduction features is modest. However, it is cheaper than Palo Alto's terminal solution.

Check Point should be considered by enterprises that subscribe to Check Point non-endpoint products to reduce vendor relationships and overhead and take full advantage of Check Point's integrated portfolio.

Palo Alto's transition to XDR from EDR ultimately makes this an unbalanced comparison between the two security products, as XDR represents an evolution of EDR. This means that, in direct comparison, Palo Alto's XDR offering has a clear advantage over Check Point's EDR tools.