Cybersecurity professionals rely on multiple tools to defend against attacks. However, these security tools often operate in siloes and lack unified visibility.
As a result, security teams are overwhelmed with countless low-quality alerts and risk missing ongoing attacks. Taking cybersecurity to the next level requires consolidated threat visibility across the entire attack kill chain.
Detection
As attacks become more sophisticated and as employees shift to remote working, security teams are overwhelmed by a growing attack surface. Extended detection and response deliver security efficiencies and productivity benefits through proactive, unified detection and response across multiple layers of protection.
XDR extends visibility and threat prevention to include non-endpoint data streams such as networks, servers, cloud workloads, identity, and applications. This lets security teams see the full attack path, timeline, and indicators from a single view.
By aggregating and normalizing volumes of alerts from these different sources, XDR weeds out anomalies determined to be insignificant so that analysts only receive the signals that require their attention. This reduces the number of alerts, eliminating the need for manual tuning and data integration. It also enables using powerful, pre-built XDR analytics and correlation content to detect stealthy threats that may have bypassed traditional defenses.
With a single, comprehensive view of the network, XDR makes it easier to find the right tool or workflow for an investigation and respond quickly. Security analysts can then drill down into the root cause with detailed telemetry, root cause analysis, and attacker actions for surgical threat neutralization. XDR’s centralized management and automation capabilities simplify and streamline detecting, investigating, and responding to threats.
Response
The longer a threat remains within an organization’s network, the more opportunities it has to damage systems and steal valuable data. That’s why security teams need better ways to know when threats are present and faster ways to highlight and neutralize them when they appear.
XDR is designed to address this challenge, providing security teams with the visibility and intelligence they need to stop advanced threats from penetrating their networks and doing harm. XDR monitors alerts and events generated across multiple security layers (endpoints, firewalls, servers, cloud workloads). Then, it uses data analysis to correlate context from thousands of disparate alerts and surface only the most critical ones.
This approach reduces noise, and the number of alerts security teams receive, improving their ability to identify and respond to incidents faster. It also improves the accuracy of alerts by reducing false positives and enabling them to validate better each event’s impact on business operations and overall security posture.
In addition, XDR enables security teams to quickly and easily remediate threats – from endpoints to servers, networks, and cloud workloads – through automated, closed-loop response capabilities that deliver the right actions at the right time. This helps eliminate the human error standard in traditional point solutions that force users to manually build detection, classification, investigation, and response processes using Lego blocks provided and tuned by their vendors.
Analytics
A security breach is a serious business risk. But a single incident can take days or weeks to detect. IBM’s cost of a data breach reports that it takes an average of 277 days for organizations to respond to a cyberattack, and the longer the time it takes to detect and respond to a threat, the more costly it is to remediate.
Sophisticated threats and the proliferation of distributed and remote workforces make defending against cyberattacks difficult. XDR analytics and automation to combat the growing complexity of attacks.
XDR analytics integrates and analyzes data from multiple sources to prevent, detect and respond to advanced threats across the entire enterprise infrastructure. XDR systems ingest and normalize all data and telemetry, then apply security intelligence and analytics to identify, investigate, hunt, and respond to threats in real time.
The best XDR solutions eliminate siloed tools with integrations that work with open application programming interfaces, or APIs, to integrate best-of-breed security products. This reduces meaningless security alerts and makes focusing on the most severe incidents easy. By combining data from the various tools, XDR can also stitch together related events and generate detailed logic flows to help detect anomalous behavior.
Automation
With XDR, automation at all stages of detection, analytics, investigation, and response can significantly reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR)–key metrics that directly impact the cost of a data breach. Whether in the form of lightweight data collection tools, native or open APIs, or SOAR (systems of automated workflows that orchestrate multiple security products in response to a threat), an XDR solution should enable more significant levels of automation throughout the threat life cycle.
When a threat is detected, a good XDR solution should provide visibility and context into that threat. With granular visibility across email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks, security teams can prioritize, hunt, analyze, and respond to threats, minimizing the potential damage and loss of sensitive information.
XDR goes beyond endpoints and expands protection to include networks, servers, and cloud workloads. Organizations can launch investigations, threat responses, and remediations enterprise-wide using a centralized management console from one platform.
When evaluating an XDR solution, look for its ability to automatically tie together a series of low-confidence alerts into higher-confidence events, surfacing fewer and more prioritized alerts for investigation. This enables security teams to quickly weed out the noise from critical alerts and focus on more human-led activities like threat hunting and incident response.