What Is XDR? Transforming Threat Detection and Response
What Are the PCI Compliance Levels?
XDR is a set of technologies that can help security teams perform more effective threat detection, as well as rapid investigation and response.
Unlike previous-generation security solutions, XDR is not limited to one security silo — it combines data from networks, endpoints, email, IoT devices, servers, cloud workloads, and identity systems. It combines data from all layers of the IT environment, and enriches them with threat intelligence, to detect sophisticated and evasive threats.
A primary value of XDR is that it provides prepackaged, automated threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) for a variety of threats. XDR solutions are cloud delivered, suited for distributed, heterogeneous IT environments. They are turn-key solutions that immediately provide value and improve productivity for security teams.
The Need for XDR Security
Security operation centers (SOCs) need a platform that can intelligently unify all relevant security data to reveal advanced attackers. As attackers use more sophisticated tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to exploit vulnerabilities and circumvent traditional security controls, organizations need to protect assets both inside and outside the network perimeter.
Cybersecurity Skills Shortage
Due to the global cybersecurity skills shortage, security teams are short-staffed and overworked. At the same time, the security environment has become more complex, cloud has introduced new security concerns, and the transition to remote work created a new set of challenges.
Disjointed Security Stack
Security organizations need integrated, proactive security measures to protect technology assets across traditional endpoints, mobile and cloud workloads. Adding more point solutions is not a viable solution, because teams will need to learn and certify on each tool, and they will create even more alerts to review and investigate.
Complexity of Security Investigations
Another pain point is the growing complexity of security investigations. Many security and risk managers are implementing threat hunting techniques, actively searching for malicious individuals such as malicious insiders, lone wolf attackers, hacker organizations, and state-sponsored attackers.
Working with vendor-provided, siloed security tools makes it difficult to explore data and discover threats. These tools also generate many false positives and do not integrate well with analytics and incident response tools.
These challenges gave rise to the development of XDR. XDR is a solution for all these concerns, providing one, integrated solution that pulls together data from across the environment, making it easily accessible to security analysts in one central interface.
What are the Main Capabilities of XDR Solutions?
XDR aims to simplify security visibility across the entire IT ecosystem. It does so by providing:
Unified Visibility – XDR provides visibility across endpoints, networks, cloud infrastructure, mobile devices, and more, giving security analysts data on potential security incidents without having to learn and use multiple security tools.
Centralized Configuration – Security settings can be configured on a single management platform for the entire IT environment, letting security teams apply consistent security policies across different infrastructures.
Embedded Advanced Analytics – A must have for any XDR solution is behavioral analytics. Critical to the ease-of-use of XDR is the ability to baseline normal user, group and entity activity and flag any deviation.
Time to Value – A main focus of XDR solutions is to immediately provide value and relieve strain from SOC teams. XDR provides ready-to-use, integrated and pre-tuned detection mechanisms for a range of threats. This allows organizations to quickly derive value from their cybersecurity investments.
Increased Analyst Productivity – XDR eliminates the need for security analysts to switch between multiple dashboards to manually aggregate security data. This allows them to more effectively detect and respond to security threats. Behavioral analytics, versus a sole dependency on rules and signatures, are necessary to streamline response accuracy while minimizing alert fatigue.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – XDR provides an integrated network security platform, which can reduce costs associated with internal configuration, management, and integration of point solutions.
Analyst Empowerment – XDR provides a common management and workflow experience across an organization’s security infrastructure. This reduces training requirements and empowers tier 1 analysts to investigate complex incidents without escalating to higher tier analysts.
XDR Protects the Entire Security Ecosystem
Let’s see how XDR protects different layers of the IT ecosystem:
Protecting Networks
XDR can detect abnormal behavior anywhere in the network and reveal detailed information about how threats communicate. It automatically filters incidents to help identify real attacks. Security teams receive intelligence about the source and scope of attacks so they can respond more quickly.
Protecting Email Infrastructure
XDR detects email threats and identifies infected accounts. It can also detect attack patterns such as users who are frequently attacked, users who mistakenly give attackers access, and users who receive phishing emails. XDR can automatically quarantine emails, reset accounts, and block senders. Importantly, it connects malicious email activity with security events detected in other systems.
Protecting Cloud Workloads
XDR detects threats targeted against cloud servers, containers, or other workloads, identifies threat access points, investigates the impact of threats on workloads, and understands how they spread across the network.
XDR can take automated action to stop threats, for example by implementing microsegmentation to isolate infected assets. In complex hybrid or public cloud environments, with many connection points between resources, this can catch threats early and prevent catastrophic data breaches.
Open XDR vs Native XDR
XDR is a new solution category, and two primary solution architectures are emerging, known as native XDR and open XDR.
What is Native XDR?
Native XDR is a solution that provides a closed security ecosystem, with front-end solutions that generate data, and back-end capabilities for data analytics and workflows. To provide a native XDR solution, a vendor must have all the necessary sensors for common threat detection use cases — including endpoint, network, cloud, identity, and email. In addition, the vendor must provide a backend that can automatically combine the data and enable rapid investigation.
Native XDR vendors are platform vendors with a broad portfolio of security tools, expanding their portfolio to offer an XDR solution. They could also be EDR vendors broadening their solution set into other areas of the IT environment, and adding backend features like analytics and data integration.
What is Open XDR?
Open XDR solutions focus primarily on backend analytics and workflow engines. Instead of providing its own front-end tooling, it integrates with your organization’s existing security and IT infrastructure, correlates and analyzes all relevant data. Its backend capabilities are focused on threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR), automating and optimizing TDIR workflows to enable rapid response to incidents.
Open XDR vendors address common threat use cases, providing prepackaged security content that covers all stages of the TDIR lifecycle — from identification of indicators of compromise (IoC), through alert prioritization, triage and in-depth investigation, and targeted response.
As the security stack within organizations becomes more complex, open XDR acts as a single control plane for multiple products and vendors. This provides visibility and enables orchestration and automation of operations, like the previous generation of security orchestration and automation (SOAR) technology. This leverages existing security investments, while improving productivity for SOC teams, and eliminating tedious manual workflows.
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