XDR - Understand the Importance of This Security Concept

Have you heard of XDR (Extended Detection and Response)? This SaaS tool recently appeared on a list of the top 10 security projects.

Since then, experts have been bringing a new holistic approach to XDR and proactive protection against today's sophisticated cyberattacks.

Past security technologies were not developed to handle the complex and dynamic threat landscape we face now. Today, we deal with a world of distributed and cloud-driven infrastructure, remote work, and 5 billion parallel video conferences, increasing the complexity of ensuring operational and business security.

Additionally, as any professional in the field will tell you, the number of attacks, cyber invaders, and offensive toolsets are growing.

So, to help you understand the importance of XDR for your company and its cybersecurity, and also how to implement it in your daily operations, keep reading. We’ll tell you all about XDR!

What is XDR?

The concept of XDR, or "Extended Detection and Response," is an evolution of EDR, a tool that connects and automatically collects security information and events. It also correlates data across multiple security layers, making detection more efficient, analyses faster with richer data, and responses more accurate, as the strategy is based on security intelligence.

XDR is designed to help security teams with:

• Identifying highly sophisticated or hidden threats.
• Tracking threats across multiple system components.
• Improving detection and response speed.
• Investigating threats more effectively and efficiently.

Companies currently use various software to perform different security tasks, often with detection and response tools being separate. This means there is often a delay in responding to potential breaches. Even microseconds of delay can be critical for a hacker to cause significant damage.

XDR acts as a central hub that determines whether an incident is a fire or a theft, and then sends the appropriate responders, such as firefighters or police.

Now that you know what XDR is, let’s dive deeper into how it works and understand that XDR is much more sophisticated than it seems.

How does XDR work?

XDR represents a significant advancement from current corporate resources. By accessing raw data collected from the environment, XDR can detect malicious actors using legitimate software to gain system access—a task that security information and event management (SIEM) tools often struggle with.

XDR performs automated analysis and correlation of previously collected activity data, allowing security teams to contain threats more effectively. For instance, it can compare a threat detected at an endpoint with the email or workload from which it originated to determine which other endpoints might be affected.

In summary, like EDR, XDR responds to threats to contain and remove them, but XDR’s superior data collection and integration with the environment allow for more effective responses. This personalized response helps contain not only the threat itself but also its impact on systems, such as reducing downtime on critical servers.

XDR has three components: data telemetry and analysis, detection, and response. Let's explore each:

Data Analysis and Telemetry

Focused on monitoring and collecting data across various security layers, XDR includes network endpoints, servers, and cloud.

Next, it uses data analysis to correlate the context of thousands of alerts from these layers to reveal a much smaller number of high-priority alerts, helping to prevent overload on security teams.

Detection

As you may have noticed, XDR’s ‘beyond-the-norm’ view helps filter alerts, notifying only those that truly require a response. This visibility allows creating baselines of normal behavior in an environment to detect threats using legitimate software and investigate the threat's origin to prevent it from affecting other parts of the system.

This analysis and detection are part of the security tools assembled to assist in vulnerability analysis of systems.

Response

Like EDR, XDR can contain and remove detected threats effectively and update security policies to prevent similar breaches. Unlike EDR, which operates only on endpoints and workloads, XDR goes beyond endpoint protection to address threats at all security control points, including container security, networks, and servers.

Advantages of XDR

As noted above, XDR provides a broad view of the entire IT sector’s security. This is crucial because attacks can originate from areas lacking visibility, compromising vital business data.

Moreover, continuous monitoring is necessary, and logs must be processed and correlated to make sense, as data alone are not information when analyzed in isolation.

Therefore, having solutions that aggregate and centralize data, with event and device behavior analysis, makes responses faster and more effective, leading to a more secure IT environment and a more reliable company less vulnerable to data breaches.

Here are the key benefits that XDR brings to a company:

• Extended attack detection capability.
• Reduced incident response time.
• Optimization of network and IT resources.
• Faster attack containment.
• More agile response to IT events.

Difference Between XDR and EDR

To summarize, the main difference between XDR and EDR is that EDRs focus solely on endpoint protection, i.e., connected devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones.

XDR is a more comprehensive solution that operates across all information security layers, including workstations, making it an enhancement of EDR.

So, when should you use each?

It depends on your needs! Remember that EDR focuses on endpoints, providing visibility and security for specific devices. XDR offers a broader, more strategic view of endpoint security, not just for a single endpoint but for the entire IT resource mesh of a company, including servers, cloud resources, email, remote access devices, and more.

How to Find an XDR Solution?

The primary goal when looking for an effective XDR solution is integration. The tool should seamlessly work within your security stack, using native tools with rich APIs.

Next, check if the mechanism provides correlation, prevention, and remediation ready for use.

In the third phase, assess the ability to develop this mechanism, allowing users to write their own cross-stack rules for detection and response. Beware of immature solutions or those with only new marketing without substantial improvements.

Your XDR should offer a single platform that easily and quickly builds a comprehensive view of the entire company.

Also, advanced AI-driven automation and proven machine learning algorithms are essential. So, consider whether your provider has a rich history in developing cutting-edge AI models or if they are mainly known for legacy technologies now trying to pivot.

Lastly, consider how easy it is to learn, maintain, configure, and update your XDR solution. A robust XDR solution should enhance your team's productivity with automated detection and response.

However, you want to ensure you're not just shifting your team’s work to manage or navigate a complicated solution.

In this regard, BugHunt can help. Don’t risk losses; get ahead of the curve and check out our platform!