Next Generation Endpoint Protection - CIS Control 8, Malware Defense Effectiveness, Performance Metrics and False Positive Rates

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Security Controls v6.1 is comprised of battle tested and prioritized security controls that significantly reduce the risk to businesses from cyber breach. Endpoint security is the primary objective of Control eight, Malware Defenses which will be analyzed in this study. (Manage Cybersecurity Risk with the CIS Controls). This paper details a handful of real-world testing scenarios to determine which Next Generation Endpoint Security (NGES) products have the greatest effectiveness in blocking file based malware from executing, including freshly minted zero-day variants that have been repacked so they have unique hashes. In addition to measuring efficacy in blocking malware, this paper includes a secondary scope to examine the system resource consumption introduced by these products to give the reader a better understanding of the business impact these products have on the overall end-user experience. A tertiary scope analyzes the false positive rate of NGES with respect to common administrative tools used regularly by IT practitioners on the Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 2012 R2 Server platforms.