CrowdStrike Debuts Mobile Threat Detection System at RSA Conference

RSA CONFERENCE 2019 – San Francisco – Detecting and responding to malware and threats on workstations and laptop computers has been a regular part of enterprise IT security for years. A service launching this week aims to bring those same capabilities to the smartphones that have become part of the enterprise application landscape.

CrowdStrike Falcon for Mobile is an endpoint detection and response (EDR) suite based on CrowdStrike's Falcon product for the more traditional workstations found in the enterprise. "What we've seen in 2018 is a much wider attack surface and instances of attacks against mobile devices," said Amol Kulkarni, chief product and engineering officer at CrowdStrike. "The field being shared equally, across desktops, laptops, and mobile, it was inevitable that the attack surface is going to be leveraged by attackers."

Kulkarni said that the most critical need for protecting mobile devices is visibility. "Some of the attacks are known, but a lot of the attacks that we suspect are happening are unknown. And that's because there isn't really a good solution which provides visibility and which has taken the EDR approach to mobile," he said.

The second major feature set Falcon for Mobile provides is proactive threat hunting and aid to red team members. This feature set includes capabilities such as mobile network activity tracking, highlighting clipboard actions, and monitoring peripherals and attached devices.

With the new capabilities, though, Kulkarni said that privacy remains a key concern. "Privacy is crucial in the mixed, 'bring your own device' world that we have," he said, because, "we will only monitor corporate applications, designated by corporate admins, and clearly visible to the end user." Kulkarni added, "And we would not monitor personal applications or personal data on the device."

Designing the Falcon for Mobile device agent was a challenge because performance requirements dictated that the app be as small as possible. "These are battery-powered devices so the performance impact has to be super, super minimal," Kulkarni said.

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