Skip to main content

Browser Security Protections: Best Practices

Securing the browser is critical to reducing organizational risk, and Keep Aware's best practices ensures that employees and their browsers have a baseline of protection from external threats and insider risks. This document outlines the browser threat landscape,the browser-based risks that organizations face every day, and how Keep Aware's best practices feed addresses them.

Traditional Security Tools: Lack of Browser Visibility​

Organizations today know to protect key aspects of their workforce and infrastructure. Security strategies often include traditional security tools that perform network perimeter filtering, DNS filtering, endpoint detection and response, vulnerability management, data access control to internal applications, email security, and security awareness training. (These tools are considered "traditional" because they have been around for a while and are widely recognized as fundamental.) While these security tools contribute to a sound defense-in-depth security strategy, most strategies have overlooked the risk of not securing one of the most-used applications in the workforce: the browser.

The browser is a cornerstone of modern-day employee productivity. In today's hyper-connected digital environment, an organization's workforce spends upwards of 90% of their time accessing the internet and using a browser. The problem is: traditional security tools usually lack deep visibility into web browser activities. Because of this lack of visibility, the browser is where data unknowingly leaks and people-targeted attacks thrive.

Browsers and the Threat Landscape​

The browser presents a wealth of opportunities for threat actors to socially engineer users, harvest data, and remain undetected—

  • from a phishing email that lures a victim to zero-day fake login page;
  • while visiting a legitimate website hosting malicious content;
  • when typing sensitive data into a (mal-intent) Google Form;
  • as a user downloads an extension that secretly harvests data.

In each of the above scenarios, traditional security tools are unknowingly bypassed. The browser, on the other hand, has the native visibility to distinguish between legitimacy and malice.

Keep Aware: Securing the Browser​

Visibility is the first step to ultimately reducing risk. From login activities to content-aware webpage evaluations, from input actions to extension manifest analyses, Keep Aware has the visibility and capability to protect against browser risks.

Keep Aware's Best Practices Feed​

To rapidly reduce your organization's browser risks, we recommend subscribing Profiles to our Best Practices Feed, a living collection of fundamental and high-fidelity detections and protections.

Browsing Risks and the Keep Aware Advantage​

For a deeper dive into browser risks and how Keep Aware effectively addresses them, refer to the following documentation.

  1. Phishing Protection
  2. Content Filtering
  3. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (documentation coming soon)
  4. Extension Security

Table of Contents