Endpoint Protection Has Limitations

Cyber attacks increased exponentially in 2021, sadly making it a landmark year for successful breaches. This dramatic growth in cyber attacks combined with an increase in threat complexities represents a nightmare for cyber security teams. Pandemic related compression of some cyber security budgets also creates a perfect storm for rogue actors. Faced with a monumental challenge, an organisation’s ability to identify cyber threats and respond to them quickly has never been so critical. Yet, traditional threat detection and response approaches, comprising layered visibility across systems, have repeatedly fallen short. 

EDR as an example detects only 26% of initial attack vectors, while also overwhelming security teams with a high volume of security alerts – often leading to critical alerts being ignored. Detection of threats by EDR solutions – as with antivirus tools – relies heavily on digital signatures to detect malware and ransomware. The sheer volume of new malware, combined with the increase in polymorphic variants that change appearance each time they replicate, has created an insurmountable challenge for EDR systems. Incidences of malware and ransomware continue to grow at a significant pace. Identification of breaches also remains a massive challenge. The average time to identify and contain breaches currently stand at 197 days and 69 days respectively. Ample time for hackers to patiently achieve their attack objectives post breach.

Extended Detection & Response (XDR)

An extended detection and response (XDR) solution is designed to aggregate the key telemetry that is generated by traditionally, siloed security products, including firewalls, EDR tools, CASB platforms, vulnerability risk management tools, public clouds, threat intelligence, and more. The XDR solution typically works by deploying sensors and log forwarders on physical and virtual devices throughout the network. The XDR’s centralised data processor and data lake de-duplicates, correlates, enriches, indexes and stores all of the key security data that it receives - from each of the disparate cyber security systems. AI-driven, complex analytics are continually applied by the XDR to this centralised dataset to identify cyber threats, sophisticated attack vectors and high fidelity breach events in real-time.

360° Views of Threat Vectors in Real-time

Organisations should ultimately strive for a cyber security posture of incident prevention rather than identification and containment. XDR systems are designed to unify threat prevention, detection and response by seamlessly integrating with multiple security products – not just endpoints – to form a cohesive security operations system. Thus, XDR enables a more proactive approach to threat detection and focuses on prevention first - against a landscape of increasingly sophisticated cyber attack vectors and malicious actors.

An effective XDR solution protects on-premise, Cloud and Saas based environments with complete visibility and control and spans the breadth of perimeter risks: remote users, IoT devices, control systems and sensors, laptops and mobile phones. Simplified visualisation of complex attacks - as they progress across a kill chain - provides enterprises with a unique ability to not only stop a rogue actor’s malfeasance but to also collate information integral to a potential future criminal prosecution.

Key Benefits and Features

An XDR solution offers security-minded organisation a new cyber standard:

• Advanced analytics that detect modern, complex and sophisticated attacks
• Automated interventions that block attacks in progress - without manual intervention
• Ability to map cyber attacks to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework
• Reduction in escalations to higher-skilled security analysts via enablement of tier-1 teams
• Prioritisation of security response based on attack severity and proximity to critical assets
• Consolidation of multiple security tools into a single threat detection and response solution
• Aggregation and correlation of security data from multiple security controls and sources
• Improvement of mean time to detect, mean time to respond and mean time to closure.

XDR offers organisations a higher standard for cyber security decision making through powerful data aggregation, AI-driven threat detection and sophisticated security automation. However configuration of XDR solutions, including data ingestion, orchestration and automation can pose a significant challenge to internal IT security teams - often limiting the effectiveness of product-only security approaches.

XDR Excellence is Entirely Accessible

Traditionally, small and medium businesses have lacked both the resources and expertise necessary to implement a robust and mature cyber security model. While enterprises don’t necessarily suffer from this challenge, building their own security operations center (SOC) requires significant investment and often diverts valuable resources from their core business. A Managed Extended Detection and Response (Managed XDR) service builds upon the formidable capabilities of native XDR solutions, by overlaying a managed security services framework - combined with an expert team of cyber professionals – to realise a sophisticated and mature cyber posture. 

Managed XDR provides an organisation – regardless of its size – with the support and expertise necessary to mitigate cyber threats across the kill chain. Monitoring 24x7 by cyber experts via a Managed XDR service offers businesses the opportunity to augment their existing cyber security functions and realise a more mature, proficient cyber posture at a relatively lower cost.

Continuous Threat Hunting

Organized, structured and contextualized telemetry from security systems environment-wide provides the centralised, Managed XDR service team with actionable intelligence – enabling threats to be hunted, identified and remediated around-the-clock by skilled cyber experts. Proactively identifying and mitigating attacks - through a combination of AI and human knowledge – enables organisations to realise a prevention first cyber posture.

Advanced Orchestration & Interventions

Managed XDR comprises advance automation and orchestration of security processes and interventions, which in addition to achieving a more robust, intuitive cyber defense, also importantly reduces the operational burden on internal IT security teams. Prioritisation of cyber security alerts and notifications – in particular the reduction of false positives – is also a key tenet of an effective Managed XDR service.

Incident Management & Response

Managed XDR service users benefit greatly from tailored incident response playbooks and triage strategies, which are expertly combined with customisable security analyst interactions and event interventions – to realise an elevated level of incident response and management. Furthermore, advanced incident containment and digital forensics expertise are an integral part of the Managed XDR service value proposition for customers.