Why the Future of Endpoint Security Is Preemptive 

The Gartner® Hype Cycle for Workspace Security, 2025 report is out — and Morphisec is proud to be recognized as a sample vendor for the third year in a row in the report’s ‘emerging’ category for Automated Moving Target Defense (AMTD), a technology gaining traction as the backbone of modern, proactive cybersecurity. 

In our view, the report highlights a clear shift that’s underway: a move away from siloed, reactive detection and response and toward to unified, preemptive defense strategies that adapt in real time to evolving threats — especially in the face of AI-powered attacks, ransomware, and fileless malware. 

This shift isn’t just a trend. It’s a survival strategy. 

Why Endpoint Security Needs to Evolve — Now 

According to Gartner, in 2025, generative AI (GenAI) powers both sophisticated cyber attacks — such as deepfakes, polymorphic, malware and automated phishing — and advanced threat detection. Gone are the days when endpoint protection meant deploying an antivirus, endpoint detection and response (EDR) or endpoint protection platform (EPP) and calling it a day. 

Today’s attackers use generative AI to craft deepfakes, launch polymorphic malware, and engineer phishing campaigns so convincing they bypass even the most trained employees. Meanwhile, legacy detection-based tools struggle to keep up, let alone stay ahead. 

As Gartner warns in its Hype Cycle for Workspace Security, 2025 report: “By 2030, over 95% of organizations will encounter daily AI-driven cyberattacks, requiring security leaders to implement AI-powered threat detection and automated response across workspace environments.”¹ 

What’s needed now is an entirely new approach — one that doesn’t wait for threats to emerge, but prevents them from taking root in the first place. 

Enter AMTD: A Dynamic Shield for Modern Endpoints 

Gartner defines AMTD as a proactive technology that continuously morphs system resources—runtime memory layouts, network configurations, credentials, binaries—to make exploitation unpredictable and far more difficult for attackers.

In one example, a sophisticated banking trojan campaign delivered a fileless downloader that morphed in memory before dropping its payload. Morphisec’s ultralightweight AMTD agent instantly neutralized the attempt—without scanning signatures or behavioral heuristics—by deterministically blocking the unauthorized process at execution time, long before any malicious payload could take hold.  

In another incident involving the ProxyShell vulnerability, attackers attempted to deploy a stealthy crypto-miner (ProxyShellMiner). Morphisec’s AMTD intervened by dynamically shifting memory and execution context, halting the exploit before it could embed itself, effectively disrupting both the attacker’s reconnaissance and payload delivery phases.  

These examples showcase AMTD’s core strengths: 

• Near-zero false positives and system overhead—thanks to precise, deterministic enforcement 
• Unpredictable attack surface—continuous runtime transformations disorient attackers and break automated malware chains
• Prevention-first mindset—stopping threats before infiltration, rather than detecting them post-execution 

By embedding AMTD into your defense stack, you move from reactive threat detection to real-time adaptive prevention, ensuring that endpoints are no longer static targets—but moving, resilient fortresses. 

And according to Gartner, AMTD delivers multiple business-critical benefits too: 

• Lowers operational costs by reducing manual security workloads and minimizing false positives
• Improves business continuity by decreasing downtime from ransomware and zero-day attacks
• Strengthens endpoint protection even when EDR tools are bypassed    
• Reduces risk of data loss and reputational damage across critical sectors like healthcare, finance and infrastructure
• Accelerates incident response and recovery, empowering lean security teams to protect more with less

Morphisec: The Leader in Preemptive Endpoint Defense 

Morphisec has been at the forefront of AMTD innovation for nearly a decade. Its Anti-Ransomware Assurance Suite (powered by patented AMTD technology), helps global organizations protect critical workloads from modern attacks — including fileless malware, ransomware-as-a-service, and in-memory exploits. 

But AMTD is only part of the equation. Morphisec champions a broader preemptive cyber defense mindset: a strategic shift that focuses on minimizing exposure, blocking threats pre-execution, and reducing reliance on reactive detection tools.  

Check out these blogs to learn more about preemptive cyber defense:  

• What Is Preemptive Cyber Defense? 
• How Preemptive Defense Stops Ransomware & AI-Driven Attacks 

From Reactive to Resilient: A New Endpoint Protection Strategy 

The Gartner report also calls for security and risk management leaders must adopt comprehensive, integrated solutions — like extended detection and response (XDR), automated security control assessment (ASCA), and unified endpoint security — to address the expanded attack surface from hybrid work, Internet of Things (IoT) and supply chain risks.

But layered into this stack, AMTD delivers a critical advantage — unpredictability. In a landscape where attackers are always watching, predictability is a vulnerability. By making systems dynamically elusive, AMTD raises the cost of attack for threat actors, while lowering the cost of defense for defenders. 

And with Morphisec, organizations can deploy this capability with near-zero impact on performance, even in complex environments — from critical infrastructure to cloud workloads and OT systems. 

What’s Next: AMTD for All Sectors 

Gartner recommends prioritizing AMTD as part of your defense-in-depth strategy in highly targeted sectors — such as government, financial services, healthcare, and insurance — where advanced threats and regulations demand robust protection.

As AMTD matures, forward-looking security teams will adopt it not just as a complementary control, but as a cornerstone of modern endpoint protection. 

Download a copy of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Workspace Security, 2025 report to learn more about how we believe AMTD is reshaping endpoint security and why the world’s top analysts — and security leaders — are making the move to preemptive cyber defense. 

¹ Gartner, Hype Cycle for Workspace Security, 2025, Franz Hinner, 21 July 2025  

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark and Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.   

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.  

About the author

Brad LaPorte

Chief Marketing Officer

Brad LaPorte is a seasoned cybersecurity expert and former military officer specializing in cybersecurity and military intelligence for the United States military and allied forces. With a distinguished career at Gartner as a top-rated research analyst, Brad was instrumental in establishing key industry categories such as Attack Surface Management (ASM), Extended Detection & Response (XDR), Digital Risk Protection (DRP), and the foundational elements of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). His forward-thinking approach led to the inception of Secureworks’ MDR service and the EDR product Red Cloak—industry firsts. At IBM, he spearheaded the creation of the Endpoint Security Portfolio, as well as MDR, Vulnerability Management, Threat Intelligence, and Managed SIEM offerings, further solidifying his reputation as a visionary in cybersecurity solutions years ahead of its time.