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Last Update: December 2020
Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions provide threat detection and protection that go beyond typical endpoint protection and EDR security. With XDR, you can centralize your threat tooling stack and gain greater control over your security. XDR features typically include network analysis, integrated threat intelligence, machine learning-based detection, user-friendly investigation response orchestration, and dynamic deployment. See XDR in action here
Extended detection and response is considered the evolution of existing threat detection and response solutions. It applies proactive measures by providing visibility of data across endpoint, network and system components in combination with analytics and automation.
XDR is designed to help security teams:
XDR was developed as an alternative to reactive endpoint protection solutions, which only provide one layer of visibility or event correlation without response. For example, endpoint detection and response (EDR) or network traffic analysis (NTA) tools.
While still useful, these layer-specific tools tend to provide greater volumes of alerts, require more time to investigate and respond to events, and require more maintenance and management. In contrast, XDR consolidates tooling and enables security teams to work more effectively and efficiently.
Want to dive deep into XDR? Here are some resources
XDR is different from other security tools in that it centralizes, normalizes, and correlates data from multiple sources. These capabilities enable more complete visibility and can expose less obvious events.
By collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources, XDR solutions are able to better validate alerts, thereby reducing false positives and increasing reliability. This helps reduce any time teams might waste on excessive or inaccurate alerts. According to Gartner, this results in improved productivity in security teams and allows faster, more automated responses.
Although similar results can be achieved with a combination of EDR and security incident and event management (SIEM) solutions, XDR goes beyond these capabilities. SIEM solutions collect shallow data from many sources while XDR collects deeper data from targeted sources. These collection methods enable XDR to provide better context for events and eliminate the need for manual tuning or integration of data. Moreover, because the alert sources are native to the XDR solution, the integration and maintenance effort required for monitoring alerts in a SIEM is eliminated.
You can learn more about endpoint security concepts in our guides:
To better understand how XDR is different from traditional EDR tools, it helps to understand what features solutions typically include.
XDR solutions rely on a range of analytics for threat detection. Below are some of the analytical features that are typically included:
Once suspicious events are detected, XDR can provide tools that help security teams determine the severity of a threat and respond accordingly. Below are some of the features included in XDR that can assist with investigation and response:
XDR solutions are designed to provide additional benefit over time. Below are some of the features that help accomplish this goal:
XDR can provide support for a wide range of network security responsibilities. It can also be adopted to help support specific use cases, depending on the maturity of your security teams. Below are three use cases, mirroring the tiers that security professionals are often classified with.
An XDR platform can provide the following benefits:
While XDR platforms are a significant improvement over traditional tools and many EDR systems, these solutions are not foolproof. To ensure that your implementation is effective and that you are getting the greatest protection for your investments, make sure to avoid the following mistakes.
Complexity of integration
XDR solutions need to integrate smoothly with your existing solutions. If integration requires excessive work or custom plugins, you lose out on productivity gains. You’ll likely also have to sacrifice some of the control and visibility that makes XDR an improvement over alternatives. If the platform you want doesn’t integrate well, you’re likely better off finding another.
While you may not get all of the features of your preferred platform, not having to maintain or build an integration from scratch can be worth the compromise. Being able to take advantage of native integration enables you to implement a new platform quickly and provides immediate protection enhancements.
Likewise, when looking to integrate additional tooling with your XDR, make sure to prioritize those that are already compatible. In general, you should be wary of applications, tools, and services that require additional integration work since this is a debt you’ll have to carry forward.
Lack of sufficient automation
Automation is a key driver of the efficiency of XDR. The ability to automate tracking, alerts, and responses is what reduces the workload of security teams and enables them to focus on higher-level tasks. However, automation needs to go beyond simply sandboxing processes or blocking all traffic to be effective.
The XDR platform you choose should ideally include automation that adapts to current system conditions and responds based on multiple parameters. For example, recognizing when a device has connected to your network and being able to either match it to a previous user profile or assigning it a temporary status. This can then enable you to more closely monitor unknown devices and more quickly restrict potentially malicious access.
Operational complexity
XDR platforms are supposed to ease the efforts of security and response teams. This goes beyond interfaces and dashboards and extends to configuration and maintenance requirements. If a solution is difficult to update or does not enable settings to be easily set or changed, its value decreases.
Additionally, if a platform is constructed of various technologies that are not natively-linked, your teams are effectively still using disparate tools. These tools are unlikely to be as effective and are more likely to require extra operational efforts. Instead, you should look for platforms that include native services and functionalities that don’t require external add-ons.
EDR was created to provide perimeter wide protection for a system. This was an advancement on existing methods as it provided coverage for a primary component in an attack, endpoints. The result was proactive endpoint security that covered many security gaps and blindspots.
Effective use of EDR still requires collaboration with other tools and processes, however. It cannot protect your system on its own. It also cannot provide full visibility of your system. Rather, it can provide limited visibility into what actions attackers are taking on your endpoints. If you want to know what happened throughout the attack, you need to bring in other monitoring and detection tools.
XDR was designed to fill this information gap. Unlike EDR, it can provide visibility into every phase of an attack, from endpoint to payload. By integrating XDR into your security platform, you can collate information from across your systems. This helps you determine a more accurate picture of past attacks as well as attacks in progress. This is especially important as networks become more distributed and more external services are incorporated and provided system access.
Learn more about EDR in our guide: What Does EDR Stand For?
Cynet 360 is the world’s first Autonomous Breach Protection platform that natively integrates the endpoint, network and user attack prevention & detection of XDR with the automated investigation and remediation capabilities of SOAR, backed by a 24/7 world-class MDR service. End to end, fully automated breach protection is now within reach of any organization, regardless of security team size and skill level.
Cynet 360 can be deployed across thousands of endpoints in less than two hours. It can be immediately used to uncover advanced threats and then perform automatic or manual remediation, disrupt malicious activity and minimize damage caused by attacks.
Get a free trial of Cynet 360 and experience the world’s only integrated XDR, SOAR and MDR solution.
Learn more about the Cynet 360 XDR Security Solution:
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XDR stands for eXtended Detection and Response:
The main promise of XDR is to reduce the likelihood of breaches that will have an impact on an organization and its customers.
XDR gives analysts contextual information about real attacks that can help them understand, contain and eradicate the threat more quickly. It can do this by combining data sources from the entire cybersecurity ecosystem, including endpoints but extending to networks, cloud resources and other resources, and helping analysts visualize the entire kill chain.
In addition, XDR can achieve significant efficiencies in security organizations, which suffer from a talent shortage and scarce resources. XDR is a unified platform, rather than a set of separate security tools, making it easy to deploy, upgrade, expand, and manage. This reduces the need for extensive training and certifications, and improves productivity, especially for Tier 1 security analysts.
XDR collects activity data from multiple vectors including endpoints, servers, and networks, providing a level of detection that is difficult or impossible to achieve with SIEM or isolated security solutions.
Tools like next generation antivirus (NGAV), endpoint detection and response (EDR) or network detection and response (NDR) are only effective against attacks that are focused on one layer of the security environment, and find it difficult to detect and respond to threats that cross multiple layers, for example leveraging a compromised endpoint to attack the network.
XDR takes endpoint detection and response (EDR) one step further, evolving the original EDR approach which focused on a single security vector.
EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) is still of great value, and XDR solutions continue to leverage EDR capabilities to protect endpoints. However, EDR is ultimately limited because it can only see the endpoint in a complex attack story. This limits the scope of the threats that can be detected and mitigated. In this sense, XDR is better than just EDR alone, because it extends the benefits of EDR to threats that go beyond the endpoint to target additional security layers
Here are five leading XDR security solution providers: