Stealthy threats often evade detection by hiding among security silos and disconnected solution alerts, propagating and growing in severity. XDR breaks down these silos and automates the analysis of a superset of rich data to detect threats faster. Managed XDR leverages an external cybersecurity vendor’s technology, capabilities, and alerts to take some of the strain off overextended IT teams. It also enables rapid and seamless integration of new feature releases.
What is it
XDR technology is an integrated solution that eliminates blind spots in cybersecurity by unifying multiple data sources and security tools. It provides a centralized view of threats and alerts, which can be prioritized and responded to more efficiently. Unlike security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, which typically collect several logs and alerts but cannot scale, XDR provides the visibility to cut through the noise and find the threat patterns that need immediate attention. Using advanced techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence, XDR scours the gathered data for any signs of cyber threats. It works like a security officer watches every screen to catch any suspicious activity that could signal a break-in. Once a potential threat is detected, XDR uses deep analysis and context to understand the nature of the attack and how it has impacted the organization. It then stops the threat in its tracks — stopping malware, securing email gateways, blocking global banned IPs, scanning directories for malicious file extensions, and more. The XDR solution can detect advanced ransomware, zero-day attacks, memory-only exploits, and fileless threats by analyzing and prioritizing a unified incident view with solid analytics. XDR empowers overextended security teams and SOCs to hunt, resolve, and contain advanced threats. The result is fewer data breaches and less damage.
How does it work
The XDR platform centralizes, normalizes, and correlates security data from multiple sources. This helps reduce the number of alerts security teams receive, making it easier to manage. This also allows XDR to validate better alerts, which reduces false positives and improves productivity. XDR is an ideal solution for businesses with complex IT environments. Combined with an EDR platform, it can help protect your business from advanced threats by collecting and analyzing data from your security layers. This includes email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. XDR can automatically detect, prioritize, and hunt threats across these systems. While traditional security solutions such as SIEM are helpful, they often provide a limited view of the threat landscape and cannot hunt for and remediate threats. Unlike traditional SIEM, proper XDR platforms integrate with and provide complete visibility into an organization’s security layer by providing rich telemetry, context, and prescriptive response playbooks.
Moreover, a centralized and unified XDR platform can help organizations meet compliance regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, and GLBA. Additionally, an XDR solution can help to protect against network-based attacks by preventing users from downloading malware through its anti-malware and phishing applications. This can also be achieved through its network segregation capabilities, which prevent attackers from seeing the entire network and stealing credentials or services.
What are the Benefits?
When a threat is identified, XDR automatically triggers countermeasures. This approach dramatically reduces the time it takes to detect and respond to threats, which improves MTTD and MTTR rates. Unlike traditional SIEM, XDR goes beyond alerts to offer complete visibility into an organization’s cybersecurity across multiple attack surfaces. This includes endpoints, email, servers, network devices, cloud workloads, and more. It also offers context and curation for improved threat detection and response. It reduces alert fatigue by unifying findings from all the tools in a single console, providing context for each detection and eliminating alert overload. Its unified incident engine and automated root cause analysis reduce the number of alerts security teams need to review. XDR can also improve lateral movement detection by monitoring all traffic in a system rather than just individual firewalls or servers. XDR can also protect against multi-stage attacks by identifying the different components of an attack and how they interact. It can then thwart attacks by disabling the parts and blocking them from connecting to the internet, stopping the spread of infection. It’s also more effective than traditional SIEM solutions for finding evasive and persistent threats hiding in an organization’s dark corners, enabling it to catch attackers when they change tactics.
What is its Importance?
XDR is important because it allows organizations to protect against threats that would be difficult to detect or stop using only their existing tools. It also helps speed up incident response times and enables them to shut down advanced threats such as insider abuse, ransomware, fileless and memory-only attacks, and more. It combines EDR and MDR with threat-hunting and forensics elements to protect against modern, sophisticated cyberattacks. It centralizes telemetry and correlates alerts from multiple security layers, including endpoints, networks, servers, and cloud workloads, to reduce noise and surface the most critical events. The unified incident view and root cause analysis from XDR help to quickly pinpoint the most likely attack path. Unlike SIEM, which can be overwhelmed with events and require manual, time-consuming work to sift through alerts, XDR delivers greater visibility and context into advanced threats. It allows you to shut down every stage of an attack, preventing any additional damage from being caused. Once a threat is identified, XDR automatically initiates countermeasures to neutralize the attack. This is similar to how a burglar alarm is triggered upon spotting a thief entering the house. Once the threat is stopped, XDR continuously learns from the experience to guard against future attacks. This makes it a more efficient and cost-effective way to protect your organization against the latest and most dangerous cyberattacks.
