In today’s increasingly complex cyber threat landscape, security teams are faced with an ever-increasing backlog of alerts and limited budgets. This leaves them little time for strategic initiatives or hunting down new threats.
These challenges are compounded by a proliferation of tools that have become more difficult to use and maintain. Organizations require assistance deciding which options best meet their security objectives.
EDR
EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) is an emerging cybersecurity solution that monitors workstations, servers, and other endpoints to give security analysts immediate access to details about attacks in progress. It also allows them to take swift action by quarantining the affected device, blocking malicious processes, or performing incident response procedures.
Cybercriminals are becoming more skilled, so organizations must do their utmost to prevent attacks from taking place. The longer an attack goes undetected in a network, the closer they get to critical business assets and the larger the loss – damages that could compound with each passing minute.
EDR solutions utilize advanced analytics and cyber threat intelligence to detect threats. These analytics and intelligence feed data into EDR systems, which then identify them based on their behavior patterns.
Threats like malware, ransomware, and other malicious files penetrate networks and cause extensive harm. It’s essential to have the capability of reviewing files at a granular level – such as checking each email attachment for suspicious or harmful content.
This capability is crucial, as it enables EDR systems to detect emerging malware threats that are difficult to capture with traditional antivirus and antimalware products. Furthermore, it’s useful for recognizing threats already discovered by other security tools.
EDR solutions are also designed to automate certain response activities based on predefined rules, helping reduce the workload for security teams and boosting efficiency.
Furthermore, EDR tools often feature forensic capabilities that enable investigators to track past breaches and detect potentially infected devices. This capacity helps create timelines, identify affected systems after a breach, and collect artifacts.
EDR solutions utilize telemetry data collected from devices and processes, along with logs from the cloud and other security systems, to detect suspicious activity on endpoints. They then analyze this information to detect anomalies and generate alerts for investigation and remediation purposes. Furthermore, this data can be further enhanced with additional contextual information derived from correlated events.
XDR
Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, and they’re getting better at evading detection. Security teams need to become faster and more accurate at detecting threats while also being able to act swiftly when they’re identified.
Detecting and responding to threats is no small feat, yet it must be done in order to mitigate risks. XDR solutions solve this problem by collecting data from multiple security layers for faster detection and response times.
With a single, comprehensive threat view and central dashboard, XDR solutions provide the ability to prevent, contain, and respond to threats across your entire network. This is because they don’t rely on manually created rules and tags but instead utilize machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies for the automatic identification of threats.
Furthermore, XDR platforms can aid organizations in understanding their networks more fully by automatically learning from new network activity as it occurs. This provides a vantage point of your system that allows your team to identify potentially hazardous behaviors early on.
As such, XDR can detect threats more quickly than traditional EDR or MDR systems, helping reduce response times and minimizing disruption to your business operations. Recently, Sangfor came up with a solution called XDDR which is Extended Defense Detection and Response
XDR can reduce false positives by identifying and eliminating them before they reach your security teams. Furthermore, it automates and streamlines security processes that may take too much time for a security team.
XDR offers the primary advantage of significantly reducing alert noise. This is particularly advantageous for enterprises with large, intricate networks. Furthermore, it reduces the time teams must spend sorting through alerts from SIEM solutions.
For maximum benefits, XDR platforms need an advanced analytics engine. They should also be built upon a cloud-based infrastructure that permits rapid scaling up or down to accommodate any workloads required by analysts.
Many security teams struggle to stay abreast of the sheer volume of alerts they receive from various sources. This puts them under considerable operational strain and hinders their capacity for conducting investigations and responding to threats. XDR solutions prioritize alerts based on severity, allowing security teams to quickly analyze and triage new events with minimal operational impact.
What is MDR?
Due to the growing volume and sophistication of cybersecurity threats, companies often lack internal security personnel with the necessary skill set to handle them effectively. As a result, many have turned to external providers who can offer skilled resources and help them stay ahead of the competition.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is an innovative service that provides advanced capabilities to monitor, detect and respond to cyber threats. It combines the strengths of traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology and endpoint detection/response tools with specialized expertise in threat hunting and security analytics.
Gartner notes that MDR vendors provide a suite of services designed to strengthen an organization’s security posture and reduce the likelihood of security incidents. These can be implemented as part of an enterprise’s existing program or as an adjunct to an in-house security team, according to Gartner.
Organizations that cannot afford a full-time threat hunter will find MDR an economical alternative for staying abreast of an ever-evolving threat landscape. Furthermore, XDR provides a unified view of data from multiple sources which can expedite threat detection and response, enabling companies to detect threats quickly and take appropriate actions.
XDR also helps organizations boost productivity by automating the correlation of disparate data points and minimizing false positives. This makes running a full security program much more efficient, leading to quicker progress toward greater cybersecurity maturity for an organization.
Effective MDR services must also provide reporting and measurement features to allow security teams to demonstrate their success and reduce threats. Without these capabilities, assessing the performance of their cybersecurity programs becomes challenging.
MDR providers should be able to integrate with any security tools an organization utilizes, providing a centralized view of their environment. Otherwise, they’ll have to work separately with each tool, creating redundancies and adding extra work for the security team.