XDR Security: 10 Ways XDR Enhances Your Security Posture
XDR security tools provide cross-layered detection and response capabilities. XDR tools gather and correlate data from multiple security layers, including networks, clouds, emails, endpoints, OT devices, servers, and applications. XDR offers a cloud-delivered, holistic approach that helps improve visibility into corporate environments. This enables security teams to quickly and effectively identify, investigate and respond to threats.
A key advantage of XDR is that it collects deep activity data and consolidates all of the information into a unified solution. It eliminates the need to weed through an endless stream of events coming from several separate tools. Instead, XDR offers a single view of data, which enables security teams to easily make logical connections and quickly mitigate threats.
Read on to understand the challenges XDR was designed to solve, the basic capabilities of XDR, and how XDR can enhance your organization’s security posture in a way other solutions cannot.
What Are the Challenges Addressed by XDR Security?
XDR security can help solve several challenges, including:
Alert Fatigue
Organizations are targeted by many types of attackers, including “lone wolves”, nation-states, hacking groups, and malicious insiders. To monitor their digital assets, organizations often implement a collection of disconnected security tools. Security teams then need to weed through the data generated by these tools as well as by other suppliers. This type of setup can result in alert overload, which often includes a massive amount of false positives. Without data analysis capabilities or incident response, false positives can lead to alert fatigue.
Lack of Resources
Security professionals are often required to do more with fewer resources than needed and with strict budget constraints. Organizations need a way to defend all technology assets, including legacy endpoints and cloud workloads, without overburdening security personnel and resources. XDR security solutions provide the centralized detection and response capabilities needed to support the effort of in-house staff and improve productivity.
Lack of Centralization
Threat actors increasingly use more complex tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to successfully exploit traditional security controls. Organizations are then left struggling to secure an increasing number of vulnerable assets inside and outside the traditional network perimeter. XDR tools can help organizations as well as security operation centers (SOCs) to intelligently bring together all relevant security data, automate response actions, and identify advanced adversaries.
Open XDR vs Native XDR
Here are the two main types of XDR and the aspects that differentiate them:
Native XDR
A native XDR is a single vendor solution that integrates with the security stack and collects telemetry data for detection and response. Native XDR solutions provide a single platform that handles and centralizes all threat detection and analytics processes. This eliminates the need to implement integrations. However, to implement a native XDR tool, organizations likely need to replace existing tools.
Open XDR
An open (or hybrid) XDR is a multi-vendor (best-of-breed) solution that integrates with other security tools, but does not require the removal of existing tools. This enables organizations to augment their existing security stack with XDR, to centralize operations into a single management plane. However, before choosing an open XDR solution, it is critical to ensure the solution offers enough integrations.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Open XDR (coming soon)
Key Capabilities of XDR
XDR security solutions have access to the raw data collected across the entire environment. XDR solutions perform automated analysis and correlation of activity data, and then detect threat actors that use legitimate software to gain access to the system.
XDR solutions typically offer the following capabilities:
- Telemetry and Data Analysis – XDR solutions monitor and collect data across several security layers, including endpoints, networks, servers, and cloud environments. Next, XDR tools use data analysis to correlate context from as many as thousands of alerts in order to detect a smaller number of higher priority alerts. This can help prevent alert fatigue.
- Detection – XDR tools offer the visibility needed to create baselines of normal behavior within a certain environment. This enables you to detect threats that use legitimate software. The information is also key in investigating the origin of a threat and helps stop it from affecting other parts of the system.
- Response – XDR solutions can help automate containment and remove detected threats. The tool can also update security policies to prevent future occurrences of a similar breach.
Related content: XDR Solutions
10 Ways XDR Enhances Security
XDR can strengthen your security posture and allows you to achieve the following:
1
Block Attacks – XDR provides AI-based analysis and behavioral threat protection that can help stop known and unknown attacks, including exploits, malware and fileless attacks.
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Gain Visibility – XDR collects and correlates data across networks, endpoints, and cloud environments and applies it to detection, triaging, investigating, hunting and threat response processes.
3
24/7 Automated Detection – XDR continuously applies AI-based analytics as well as custom rules that help detect advanced persistent threats (APTs) as well as any other covert attack such as lateral movement, malicious insiders, compromised insiders, etc.
4
Prevent Alert Fatigue – XDR uses automated root cause analysis alongside a unified incident engine to triage alerts and dramatically reduce alerts. This can help prevent alert fatigue, avoid personnel turnover, and streamline incident response.
5
Increase SOC Productivity – XDR helps consolidate security policy management as well as monitoring, investigations and response across networks, endpoints and clouds into one console.
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Eradicate Threats – XDR enables teams to shut down attacks with surgical precision without causing business disruption.
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Eliminate Advanced Threats – XDR can help protect the corporate network against malicious insiders, compromised insiders, external threats, policy violations, ransomware, advanced zero-day malware, and fileless and memory-only attacks.
8
Improve your Security Team – XDR can help detect indicators of compromise (IOCs) as well as anomalous behavior. It can also prioritize analysis using incident scoring. This can help disrupt all stages of an attack.
9
Restore Hosts to a Clean State – XDR can provide remediation suggestions to help you quickly recover from an attack. For example, how to remove malicious files and registry keys, and how to restore damaged files and registry keys.
10
Analyze Third Party-data Sources – XDR enables you to extend detection, investigation and response to external sources. For example, performing behavioral analytics on logs collected from third-party firewalls.
XDR Security with Exabeam
Exabeam Fusion XDR delivers market-leading behavioral analytics, alert triage, threat hunting, Smart Timelines™, pre-built investigation playbooks, TDIR workflow automation, and integrations with hundreds of third-party security and productivity tools that enable organizations to find complex threats that legacy tools often miss.
Unlike other XDR products that require organizations to deploy yet another data collection agent across their assets, Fusion XDR works with your existing security controls, business apps, and IT tools that already collect log and alert data enabling faster deployment and time to value. After making this data available, Fusion XDR will analyze and identify anomalous behaviors indicative of a compromised or malicious insider as well as active external threats.
Coupled with purpose-built automation across the entire threat lifecycle, Exabeam enables organizations to take a fresh approach to securing their environments, driving significant increases in both productivity and effectiveness across the SOC.
See Exabeam in action: Request a demo