Our business outlook, IT operations and, yes, mental sanity have all been stretched as we continue to live in our remote yet ever-connected world. It has forced us to evolve our operational processes and accelerate investments to support remote work, digital transformation, and faster software development. Eric Sun, Director, Cybereason, shares how advanced XDR can help enterprises scale their security operations.
In this world, even the most agile companies have had to prioritize business-critical needs over cybersecurity. The philosophy for many organizations, and understandably so, has been to adapt, introduce new technology, and ensure survival quickly.
With our collective economic recovery in progress, having grown 7.5% in 2021Opens a new window alone, cybercrime is poised to escalate and continue to bombard headlines. Where the money goes, so do criminals. This makes it more critical than ever to protect our global assets and employees, especially as they work far beyond traditional corporate premises into employees’ living rooms and bedrooms.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) continues to be a core security technology that protects both remote and air-gapped environments. EDR has since stretched to protect how employees work: through email, clouds, identities, and any network. This approach is known as extended detection and response (XDR) and is gaining massive traction as a new architecture and approach to security operations. Notably, it’s an approach that doesn’t rely on building and managing an enormous data lake and doesn’t require a well-staffed team of skilled analysts to be effective against cyber-attacks.
Raising the Bar from Endpoint Security to Advanced XDR
Advanced XDR surpasses EDR by applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to identify and correlate disparate attack behaviors into a visual depiction of any malicious operation. Rule-based routines are limited in what they can identify. Algorithms have the power to sift through telemetry to identify behaviors and specific attack sequences. This allows them to identify threats and behaviors that signatures and threat intelligence miss.
Providing security analysts with a visual attack story that reveals the root cause, scope, and sequence of a malicious operation, as Advanced XDR does, makes dealing with an incident significantly more manageable. These timelines reduce alert fatigue, upskill analysts, and clarify the situation, helping analysts understand what is happening and what to do about it.
Advanced XDR can even give recommendations on the best course of action and, in some cases, automate the response itself. Today’s Security information and event management (SIEM) and Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions cannot do this today and require highly-skilled human specialists building playbooks, workflows, and tuning to be effective. Advanced XDR solutions liberate specialists from time-consuming workflows, minimize mental strain and allow focus on strategic, higher-level work.
See More: Top 10 Endpoint Detection and Response Tools in 2022
Managing Information Silos
With advanced XDR, information silos have become a thing of the past. A unified view is built instead, bringing together identity, email, endpoint, cloud, and network context to protect employees as they work anywhere on the planet. Instead of expending energy tackling individual fires, analysts can stop the broader campaign by homing in on the chains of behavior that constitute an attack sequence. For example, suppose a cyber team identifies and removes malware on a device. In that case, they do not solve the associated problems of stolen credentials or the ongoing presence of other malicious payloads on the network.Â
When teams use advanced XDR, they are provided with accessible response capabilities, even allowing them to predict an attacker’s next move and take preventive measures that can proactively reduce risk. EDR and XDR are limited in identifying modern attacks because they focus on the endpoint in isolation from another telemetry. They are also disadvantaged by ingesting and analyzing massive amounts of data at scale. Strategies employed to compensate for this, such as smart filtering, ignore potentially helpful information, resulting in missed threats and gaps in investigation and hunting.
Future-perfect Solutions
Advanced XDR stands out from its predecessors. While all XDR solutions collect, process, and store disparate event data that might be useful, advanced XDR can actively prevent common threats such as ransomware and malware. It also delivers instant attack detection, enabling fast, accurate incident response.Â
The ideal solution would be easy to set up, fit in with legacy environments, and provide a range of integrations with your existing security and IT stack. Perhaps most importantly, it must allow teams to abandon the labor-intensive process of detect-analyze-respond and move to a more proactive detect-understand-anticipate mindset.
Before advanced XDR, this was not possible. EDR and XDR fall short. SIEM and SOAR solutions don’t quite make the mark. When combined with existing solutions, advanced XDR can deliver the visibility, automation, and accuracy needed to ensure resilient, enterprise-wide security. Advanced XDR allows defenders to close the gap between them and cybercriminals and frees up time for company innovators to pursue future projects.
How can advanced XDR be a gamechanger for your enterprise security? Share with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to know more from you!
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