With the right approach, XDR focuses on centralizing, normalizing, and correlating data from siloed security solutions. This provides security teams with better visibility into threats. It eliminates the noise and enables security teams to prioritize incidents and detect attacks faster. It works at multiple levels of the enterprise technology environment, including endpoints, networks, and cloud systems.
Detection
Unlike most cybersecurity point solutions, which are often effective in focusing on a single layer or attack surface, XDR technology provides extended detection by centralizing and correlating telemetry data to detect threats across all layers of the enterprise. By eliminating siloed, disconnected tools and giving overextended security teams a unified view of their environment, accurate XDR solutions enable them to respond more quickly, effectively, and accurately to any threat incident. Because most cyberattacks don’t need to infect the endpoint to succeed, your defenses must monitor the entire network. XDR’s intelligent machine learning algorithms do much sleuthing, detecting abnormal behavior that could signal an incoming threat and identifying the attack vector. Once a threat is detected, XDR helps mitigate its impact by quarantining the infected device or server and resetting affected credentials as needed. It also prevents future attacks by identifying the attackers responsible and blocking their IP addresses or email servers. Unlike EDR, accurate XDR solutions automate root cause analysis by showing security analysts a clear timeline and path of the threat across email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. This provides visibility and context into advanced threats, making it easier to prioritize, hunt, investigate, and remediate them before they can spread throughout the enterprise. This creates more productivity by reducing the time security staff spend navigating between tools and addressing alert overload.
Correlation
Unlike legacy security technologies limited to a single layer of the environment, XDR solutions ingest and normalize volumes of data from multiple sources and platforms: endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, identity, email, network traffic, virtual containers, and more. This data is then correlated and parsed to automatically detect stealthy threats using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The resulting visibility and threat intelligence can help speed investigations and prioritize alerts, reducing the time-consuming events that analysts need to review or investigate manually. It also helps to automate response actions, enabling teams to be more proactive in stopping attacks and closing the loop on detected incidents. In the past, cybersecurity tools limited to a specific layer of the environment generated high volumes of alerts, forcing security teams to triage a flood of disparate security information and event management (SIEM) and other security tools. This approach often failed to catch emerging threats as they evaded detection, hid in siloes, and propagated throughout the organization. XDR addresses this challenge by providing broad, integrated visibility that combines findings across security layers in a single console. This enables analysts to quickly identify and respond to threats while reducing time spent monitoring, tuning, and moving between security products. Moreover, unified workflows enable analysts to conduct ad-hoc data queries and correlations using simple scripting languages or other automated means to speed investigations.
Intelligence
XDR is the first to offer security teams more productivity by unifying detections and alerts from multiple security layers. This allows for better context, enabling a higher quality of detection, automated analysis, and improved mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and –to-respond (MTTR) rates, resulting in more business risk avoided. At its peak, a company can have as many as 22,000 events per second enter its security information and event management (SIEM) system, generating noisy alerts for security analysts to sort through. XDR solves this problem using advanced algorithms to prioritize alerts and surface critical threat events. It uses data from the full breadth of an organization’s technology environment, including firewalls, endpoints, third-party applications, IoT devices, and user personas, to correlate and identify occurrences of similar incidents and threats. It then automatically analyzes this superset of rich data to detect and resolve incidents. Rather than simply identifying correlations, XDR discovers threat context by detecting Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) for known threats and leveraging behavioral analytics to establish behavioral baselines, detecting anomalous activity across multiple sources. As a result, XDR can identify advanced and unknown attacks, such as insider abuse, fileless attacks, ransomware, and sophisticated zero-day malware. It also helps prevent damage by blocking attacks that have already made it past the endpoint and resolving them with automated responses.
Automation
Many threats are designed to evade detection by lurking between security layers. By integrating telemetry data from endpoints, networks, email, servers, and cloud workloads, an XDR solution can provide visibility and context to advanced attacks that would otherwise be missed by isolated point solutions or overlooked by SOC analysts. Threats can then be analyzed, prioritized, and hunted, and automated responses can be orchestrated to stop them. XDR combines alerts from a range of security products into a single pane of glass for analysis, reducing the manual work required to detect and respond to threats. This can help reduce mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-respond (MTTD/MTTR) critical cybersecurity performance metrics organizations measure as they evaluate solution value and ROI. Security teams need help to keep up with constant alerts and escalating threats. This often results in them needing more threats or wasting valuable time and resources responding to low-priority incidents. XDR provides an integrated view of the enterprise security landscape and automates response to improve SOC productivity and effectiveness. Unlike SIEM systems, which are primarily detection tools and gather large volumes of shallow security event logs, XDR provides integrated visibility into the enterprise security infrastructure to identify relationships between alerts and incidents. This enables security teams to focus on high-priority incidents and improve mean-time-to-detect rates and response times across their entire organization.