Modern threats require comprehensive cybersecurity solutions. From ransomware to advanced zero-day attacks, XDR effectively prevents attackers by collecting and analyzing security data.
XDR provides enterprise IT with an effective way to address its complex challenges. It integrates endpoint detection and response with network, identity, email and cloud tools for faster threat identification with more context than ever.
What is XDR?
XDR leverages advanced detection and response capabilities and unifies visibility across the IT environment. Typically, XDR solutions utilize numerous streams of telemetry from endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructure in order to detect threats that other point solutions overlook due to limited visibility or business context.
When selecting an XDR solution, look for one with a low signal-to-noise ratio and high fidelity detections. Evaluate its methodology, threat intelligence and diligence behind its detection library in order to see if it can help eliminate noisy alerts while prioritizing dangerous threats in your environment.
Also ensure your XDR solution is easy to use, manage, and update; this will reduce analyst workloads so they can focus on protecting against cyberattacks instead. Finally, consider an XDR managed service option where technology, capabilities, alerts are managed externally by an outside cybersecurity vendor in order to further streamline security operations while cutting risk, costs and resource consumption significantly while speeding time to value.
XDR Definition
XDR provides organizations with a consolidated cybersecurity solution designed to quickly prevent and respond to cyberattacks across endpoints, networks, servers, and the cloud. Furthermore, it can detect zero-day vulnerabilities and block attacks intended to exploit them.
XDR can ingest, normalize and analyze multiple streams of telemetry from various security services in an environment, to corroborate context from thousands of alerts while surface only relevant threats for security teams to address – freeing them up from unnecessary false positives and helping them focus their efforts more efficiently on critical threats than false positives.
XDR can detect and respond to all forms of malicious threats, from fileless attacks and ransomware, insider abuse and advanced zero-day malware to indicators of compromise (IOCs) and anomalous activity across endpoints, networks and clouds. Furthermore, it provides a unified incident view with root cause analysis so users can identify incidents quickly with ease while providing a single pane of glass for monitoring all network security infrastructure allowing XDR to detect attacks before they spread within an organization and respond as quickly as possible before an attack can spread into an organization by monitoring all aspects of network security infrastructure enabling prevent and responding before attacks spread within their organization enabling organizations to respond immediately thereby helping organizations protect their organization against attacks before they spread and respond as soon as possible before attacks become widespread within an organization.
How Does XDR Works?
XDR is a security system that collects and analyses data from multiple security layers to reveal the context of threat detections quickly, enabling IT teams to take swift action against them. Telemetry monitoring of endpoints, servers, networks and cloud servers monitor all this information before being unified into one pool of raw data for faster automated analysis and rich superset alerts.
Contrary to SIEM solutions, XDR doesn’t rely on an extensive array of cybersecurity technologies for proper operation; rather, its open integration system enables IT departments to select their preferred technologies and simplify operations. When selecting an XDR solution that ensures robust operations:
Security analysts relying on XDR solutions should receive tailored detections and detailed investigation results instead of having to sift through masses of alerts. Furthermore, superior solutions ensure a superior signal-to-noise ratio by correlating all data by user, asset or activity type.
Benefits of XDR Security
XDR can be an invaluable asset in helping organizations defend against attacks. To maximize its benefits, however, the key lies in selecting an engine with comprehensive cross-stack correlation, detection, prevention and response capabilities that enable security teams to respond swiftly and easily when threats emerge.
Combining threat intelligence and contextual data from multiple security layers, XDR allows it to detect malicious traffic even if it passes by system boundaries and detect zero-day attacks by correlating alerts with data across security layers.
True XDR platforms go beyond simple alert management to provide comprehensive threat detection solutions. Machine learning-based alerting provides more granular, contextualized and prioritized alerts to enhance analyst efficiency. These solutions also feature unified remediation capabilities to streamline response efforts for endpoints, servers, cloud workloads and networks. Furthermore, they offer native, relevant and actionable telemetry and curation to reduce false alerts; additionally deception technology makes it harder for cyber adversaries to gain access to production assets.
How does XDR compare to EDR or MDR?
EDR (Endpoint Detection & Response) is an endpoint security monitoring solution that gives visibility into threats and attacks that have passed traditional antivirus software. By monitoring endpoint behavior to detect malware and cyberattacks, EDR then uses detection data to identify indicators of compromise and prioritize investigations.
EDR takes threat detection and response one step further by filtering through massive log data to generate context-rich alerts that empower security teams to investigate, detect, and respond to advanced threats. EDR technology is becoming an essential asset as businesses transition away from desktop and laptop as their primary end-user devices.
Managed detection and response (MDR) serves as a managed service that outsources monitoring, threat detection, incident management, and response capabilities of an organization’s security products. MDR gives organizations increased visibility into hidden or advanced cyberattacks as well as threat visibility across their enterprise; accelerate multi-domain threat analysis/response; reduce risks; and provide increased cyber security protection.
XDR vs Other Detection Technologies
An XDR solution natively integrates network, endpoint and cloud security to stop sophisticated attacks and expedite investigations. This approach streamlines security team tasks associated with responding to threats across different platforms while unifying information from different tools in one view to quickly investigate and address threats.
Contrasting EDR, which only monitors endpoints and workloads, XDR offers broad visibility and in-depth insight into the attack surface. XDR can pinpoint where threats enter your network and which assets they affect; additionally it prioritizes alerts so your team can focus on only those threats with critical relevance.
XDR can analyze indicators of compromise and anomalous behavior to detect attacks in progress and adjust security policies accordingly, helping protect against advanced threats like insider abuse, ransomware, fileless/memory only attacks and zero-day vulnerabilities. Furthermore, its unified incident view and remediation suggestions speed up investigation efforts and contain breaches more quickly.
Improve Security Team Productivity With XDR
An effective XDR solution should automatically collect, analyze, and correlate security alerts from an organization’s endpoints, networks, servers, and cloud. It provides an unified incident view and root cause analysis that stops advanced threats while increasing security team productivity.
Contrary to EDR, XDR monitors and mitigates threats across multiple layers of technology stack, giving organizations greater insight into attacks across their entire attack story and strengthening security awareness and response capacity.
4 Key Capabilities of XDR
As organizations struggle to keep up with attackers, security teams require better ways to quickly detect threats and highlight them quickly. XDR provides this capability with integrated visibility, data analytics and automated response features.
XDR consolidates data from various cybersecurity solutions into one platform, streamlining analyst workloads and streamlining security landscape. It correlates detection and deep activity data from different layers into a rich superset of actionable information that enables automated analysis to run faster, quickly providing contextualized alerts based on threat intelligence as well as pre-built industry best practices and responding accordingly.
Goal of an XDR solution is to assist analysts with quickly finding what they need and decrease attackers’ time in an environment, where they may cause damage or steal data. A true XDR solution also provides endpoint and network protection against threats across an enterprise.
Key to reaching these objectives is having an XDR platform equipped with extended endpoint telemetry that gives analysts more context about each detection, as well as AI for behavioral baselines and anomalies detection. Furthermore, unlike traditional SIEM which uses rules-driven alerts generation methods to generate alerts, XDR allows analysts to combine lower confidence events into higher confidence events for prioritized alerts with less noise exposure. A sophisticated XDR platform should also incorporate cloud hookups and user behavior analytics (UBA) for total data visibility.
1. Collecting data from multiple security layers
Modern advanced threats are complex. They elude traditional security solutions that only address certain layers of infrastructure, often producing overwhelming volumes of alerts. Human-machine teaming provides contextual awareness from multiple sources, reducing alert volume for analysis while speeding up response times to threats.
XDR aggregates security telemetry from previously disjointed security tools and provides a centralized view of attacks at the network, endpoint, server, and cloud workload levels. Furthermore, its threat intelligence and adaptive machine learning features allow it to provide improved prevention capabilities.
XDR helps identify and hunt threats using endpoint user data such as access privileges and file activity, to quickly detect attacks. It reveals how an attack gained entry to one system before spreading across many more, so an XDR platform can identify indicators of compromise quickly to stop attacks with appropriate remediation actions taken quickly by itself – unlike SIEM solutions which collect, normalize and aggregate security data across numerous solutions to allow central visibility and management. Unlike these approaches, however, XDR automates this process for greater efficiency.
2. Advanced analytics for automated investigation
Advanced cyber threats often evade traditional security solutions by hiding in blind spots between siloed security tools, giving attackers multiple entryways for attack. With an integrated solution in place, threats such as this one can be identified and neutralized before further damage occurs.
An XDR solution can quickly aggregate data and threat intelligence from several layers of your security system – email, endpoints, network servers, cloud workloads and so forth – into one comprehensive view of any attack.
Utilizing this data, XDR can automatically respond to the most common types of threats – saving time while increasing quality responses – freeing the SOC team up to focus on more complex and high-risk threats.
Speed is of the utmost importance when it comes to detecting and responding to cyber threats, so using XDR, you can rapidly detect and respond to them through automated process, making it easier to stop attacks and reduce risks of future reoccurrences.
XDR can detect and analyze threats through a central console, making it simple for SOC teams to quickly identify the cause of an incident and respond promptly with appropriate solutions or modifications of security policies to avoid similar attacks in future.
3. Fast detection of threats
As threat adversaries become ever-more sophisticated, security teams need rapid detection to stop attacks before they cause real damage. Quickly uncovering cyber attacks is crucial in order to prevent devastating consequences such as lost revenues and productivity, brand damage, regulatory penalties or data loss.
XDR provides the fastest way to detect threats by centralizing security telemetry from multiple security tools into one platform for easier investigation and response. While traditional EDR focused solely on endpoints, XDR offers visibility across users, networks, cloud workloads and email systems – unlike its predecessor EDR which was limited in coverage area.
XDR is an advanced form of security information and event management (SIEM). Its advanced capabilities go far beyond simply detecting and analyzing events; with machine learning being leveraged to recognize, categorize, and assess potential threats that may have surfaced within an organization’s network. An organization’s security layers can be integrated and unified through its open architecture to form a more holistic approach for threat detection and response. Security practitioners can also benefit from its use, by freeing them up from manually collecting and correlating data from multiple sources. Furthermore, it offers alerting capabilities on detected cyber threats; sending alerts directly to team members for response as well as taking automated actions or providing attack story summaries for further investigation by security analysts.
4. Flexible SaaS-based deployment
Under an ever-evolving threat environment, security teams and solutions must adapt quickly in real-time in order to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and respond (MTTR), both critical performance indicators that indicate effectiveness, speed, and efficiency in response.
XDR extends EDR by integrating detection, prevention, investigation, and response across an enterprise – including network, endpoints, email accounts and cloud workloads – to better detect advanced attacks faster. This enables organizations to effectively uncover advanced attacks while decreasing time taken to stop them.
Combining an effective managed XDR solution with security team efforts can dramatically shorten attack lifecycles and lower data breach costs, freeing them up to focus on protecting their core mission of protecting business operations. XDR removes much of the burden associated with managing and analyzing telemetry from different security layers from security teams’ shoulders so they can concentrate on protecting the organization more easily.
No matter your organization’s unique requirements for an XDR solution or SaaS bundle, Trend Vision One has something suitable. Offering flexible licensing options and a unified platform, Trend Vision One lets your enterprise stay protected without technical limitations limiting protection across environments and platforms. Experience its full XDR capabilities free for 60 days now to get started today.