Detecting today’s advanced threats requires more than just a suite of point solutions. XDR breaks down siloed alerts, providing overextended SOC teams with visibility and end-to-end integration to reduce mean-time-to-detect and MTTR. XDR ingests and correlates log data and telemetry across the infrastructure layers: endpoints, email, networks, servers, and cloud workloads. It also ties into threat intelligence services that continuously update information about hackers’ cyber threat tactics, vectors, and more.
XDR Defined
The longer an advanced threat remains undetected, the more damage it can cause and the easier it is for attackers to steal sensitive data. For this reason, finding and neutralizing threats as quickly as possible is critical to minimize the time they remain inside an organization’s network. Security teams need tools to connect and integrate disparate security layers to reduce dwell time and improve detection and response. This is where XDR comes in. What is XDR? XDR is a unified platform that collects and analyzes security data across endpoints, networks, servers, and the cloud.
It also ingests and correlates threat intelligence from multiple sources, such as Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). It then identifies and prioritizes alerts for investigation and response, enabling the faster identification and mitigation of threats. Unlike traditional SIEMs, primarily used to aggregate and store logs, XDR platforms provide a holistic view of an attack across the entire enterprise. They act as a cybersecurity clearinghouse by unifying data from various security tools and providing robust, prescriptive response playbooks.
XDR also leverages AI and expert analytics to automate complex tasks such as forensic investigations, root cause analysis, and remediation. As a result, XDR offers overextended SOCs the visibility and integration they need to identify threats more rapidly and respond to them more effectively. It also removes complexity from the SOC, minimizing the manual work analysts have to do and increasing their productivity and efficiency.
Benefits
One of the top benefits is reducing the number of alerts that security teams must triage. XDR solutions monitor traffic throughout your infrastructure and ingest large volumes of data, correlating information from multiple sources to prioritize the highest-impact threats requiring action. This reduces the workload on your security team and helps them focus on their most important tasks.
Another benefit is increased threat detection and response times, which allows you to detect stealthy attacks that evade traditional endpoint security tools. XDR solutions provide visibility into your environment, identifying suspicious behavior on the network and in the cloud and detecting unknown malware or fileless attacks. This allows your organization to catch these attacks early on the kill chain.
Additionally, XDR solutions can automatically handle the bulk of routine responses, allowing your security team to dedicate their time to unique situations that require immediate attention. This also improves overall productivity and enables your team to respond to threats faster, which protects your environment from costly consequences.
Lastly, XDR solutions can integrate with SIEM and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms to enhance and extend your cybersecurity infrastructure. By delivering unified detection, response, and remediation capabilities, XDR increases protection against today’s sophisticated threats and lowers the total cost of ownership. It also optimizes existing investments and boosts SecOps efficiency.
How XDR Works
XDR aggregates and prioritizes alerts from various security solutions into a unified incident view. This unification reduces blind spots and makes it easier for security analysts to triage threats and respond quickly. Additionally, XDR leverages automation to help simplify analyst workflows and decrease the time it takes to neutralize attacks. Unlike traditional point-solution tools, XDR provides comprehensive visibility into the entire IT landscape. This includes endpoints, email, IoT devices, cloud environments, and user personas.
As a result, it is more difficult for attackers to evade detection or escape containment. Stealthy threats often elude traditional detection mechanisms. They hide among the many alerts generated by disconnected solution alerts and become more aggressive as they propagate. XDR’s holistic approach and deep activity data set detect threats more effectively while reducing the false positives that security teams must sift through.
XDR also augments security information and event management (SIEM) systems by collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing the massive volume of data they generate. While SIEMs are primarily detection tools that aggregate and store logs, they cannot automatically respond to and remediate threats. XDR fills this gap, accelerating response times and increasing team productivity. Its advanced technology can even eliminate the need for SIEM upgrades by delivering immediate improvements in mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-response rates.
Best XDR Solution
A good XDR solution should combine the data collection and analysis of EDR with the threat detection and mitigation capabilities of SOAR, network traffic monitoring, and SIEM user and entity behavior analytics. It should also be able to weed out anomalies that have been determined not to be significant from the alert stream, eliminating the need for security teams to write, tune, and manage detection rules. The XDR tool should also provide automated response actions and pre-packaged correlation content to reduce the time it takes to investigate, detect, and respond to a breach or other cyberattack.
The XDR technology should also integrate with other security tools such as firewalls, cloud security providers, antivirus, and other detection systems. It should also be easy to scale and offer flexible retention periods. And finally, it should provide a seamless upgrade path to SIEM and compliance dashboards.