PWith threats often able to hide between security silos and even spread between them, they must be detected as soon as possible. It is where XDR comes in.
Unlike traditional SIEM solutions, XDR is a centralized threat detection platform that collects and correlates data across security layers to create fewer context-rich alerts for analysts to assess.
What is XDR?
In a time of massive cyberattacks and limited security resources, XDR technology is gaining popularity because it helps to speed up response times, improve visibility into threats from multiple sources, and make complex detection capabilities more accessible. Unlike EDR, which typically only covers endpoints and workloads, XDR goes beyond traditional systems by protecting against attacks from cloud environments, IoT devices, and other parts of the business network.
Using a combination of automation, machine learning algorithms, and threat intelligence, XDR reduces the volume of data and alerts security teams must manage. It also enables them to focus on the most severe threats by prioritizing investigations and analyzing indicators of compromise. Lastly, XDR solutions help to prevent future attacks by updating security policies and eliminating vulnerabilities.
Because XDR platforms use a unified pool of raw telemetry, they can detect threats that other tools, like SIEMs, may miss. It includes the lateral movement of bad actors within the organization, weird connections, beacons, exfiltration, and more. XDR also uses advanced analytics and correlation to provide a single view of incidents, prioritized alerts, and remediation suggestions.
When looking for an XDR solution, it is essential to consider how easy the system will be to learn, maintain, configure, and update. Additionally, it is vital to choose a solution with automation backed by advanced AI and proven machine-learning models. Otherwise, organizations could redirect valuable IT staff from their core roles into managing a complicated system instead of improving productivity and protecting the organization from cybersecurity threats.
How does XDR work?
A single enterprise security team can receive thousands of alerts per second from their various security solutions. They need help correlating and prioritizing them, sifting through false positives and missed threats as attackers continuously change tactics. They face a significant challenge to hire and retain skilled staff and deal with a chronic cybersecurity skills shortage, which increases their risk profile and the time it takes to detect and respond to a threat.
XDR reduces the burden on IT and security teams by providing them with a comprehensive view of their network. It includes traditional endpoints, cloud environments, IoT devices, and user personas. It also expands detection capabilities to include lateral movement and beaconing, enabling security teams to detect stealthy attacks that are difficult for traditional solutions.
It also streamlines responding to detected threats by removing manual tasks like forensic investigation and root cause analysis. XDR does this by providing contextual visibility, automated detection and response, and powerful search capabilities to help security teams find the specific threat artifacts they need for faster and more effective remediation.
Unlike SIEM systems or SOAR platforms, which typically require lengthy deployments and additional engineering by security engineers, XDR is SaaS-based and offers broad, integrated visibility, eliminating blind spots. Moreover, it allows security teams to choose which third-party tools to integrate, avoiding costly rip-and-replace strategies.
What are the benefits of XDR?
A single platform that automates response to threats and provides unified threat visibility across all workloads and endpoints can distinguish between a successful attack and a security incident. With rising ransomware attacks, newsworthy data breaches and IP theft, strained security operations center (SOC) teams struggling with alert fatigue and staffing shortages, and sophisticated bad actors finding new ways to hide their activities, organizations need a better way to detect threats.
XDR is designed to break down these security silos by enabling you to see the bigger picture by combining and automatically analyzing telemetry from disparate tools to identify potential threats and suspicious activity. It can include detecting bizarre behavior on an endpoint, identifying negative communication patterns between devices, revealing lateral network movement and beacons, and more.
The centralized analysis provided by XDR allows you to quickly identify and respond to threats, whether they reside on your endpoints, cloud environment, network infrastructure, or even in your user persona. In addition, XDR can also automatically perform actions such as blocking an IP address or quarantining users based on your policies.
Finally, XDR can also reduce the number of alerts you receive by collecting deep activity data and feeding it into your security data lake for extended sweeping, hunting, and investigation across all layers of the enterprise – endpoint, email, network, servers, and cloud workloads. It can be augmented with AI and expert analytics to provide analysts context-rich alerts that prioritize risk and enable faster mitigation responses.
What are the drawbacks of XDR?
The biggest drawback of XDR is that it requires a level of security knowledge and expertise to get the value out of it. With this, the platform may raise alerts and provide basic information on a threat. Security teams must be able to investigate these and take appropriate action to prevent or contain the threat.
Another downside is that XDR can be expensive, especially when built on a single vendor suite. It is particularly true of native XDR tools that collect all telemetry and analytics for the solution’s EDR, NGFW, or SIEM solutions. A hybrid or open XDR system, like SentinelOne’s AI-Powered Singularity XDR Platform, is optimal.
Despite these drawbacks, XDR offers many benefits that can help improve the security posture of any organization. By combining weak signals from multiple sources, XDR can identify and detect cyberattacks before they cause harm. Then, it can use ML and AI to automate responses for quicker and more precise incident responses. It reduces mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve and helps organizations meet compliance requirements.
With advanced threats continuously targeting organizations, security teams must have access to a holistic view of their security posture. Otherwise, they might miss critical threats or allow them to be undetected for far too long. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2022 report, it takes an average of 277 days to detect and resolve a data breach.
Welcome to our blog! My name is Yuvraj Kore, and I am a blogger who has been exploring the world of blogging since 2017. It all started back in 2014 when I attended a digital marketing program at college and learned about the intriguing world of blogging.
