- XDR helps enterprises better detect, investigate and respond to the broadest range of advanced threats, across the extended enterprise.
- For businesses and government entities alike, XDR is essential for protecting against advanced threats and ensuring the security of critical data and infrastructure.
Cyberattacks have grown in intensity, sophistication and frequency over the past 12 months, with malicious actors benefitting from growing geopolitical conflicts, economic uncertainty, and rapid digitization.
Additionally, threat actors have started blurring the lines between traditional IT attacks and emerging OT/IoT threats.
Security Operations Centre (SOC) teams face a daily barrage of incomplete or inaccurate alerts that very often lack vital contextual information, many of them false positives.
Visibility is the key challenge
As a result, analysts can miss critical threats or take longer to investigate and respond to them, increasing the risk of a breach. In fact, a recent survey by Forrester Consulting revealed that the typical SOC receives over 11,000 alerts per day, or 450 alerts per hour, many of them low fidelity, low confidence alerts, and false positives.
Visibility remains the core enterprise security challenge; to see the status of all connected devices across your enterprise, not limited solely to traditional IT devices.
Every organisation relies upon technology to run its day-to-day- operations, and with increasing attack complexity, cybersecurity solutions have also evolved to detect, prevent, and respond to these threats.
One such solution is XDR (Extended Detection and Response) which helps enterprises better detect, investigate and respond to the broadest range of advanced threats, across the extended enterprise.
The importance of XDR lies in its ability to provide a more holistic approach to cybersecurity, refined with context to eliminate noise, allowing organisations to better protect themselves against advanced threats.
Automating manual tasks
The true value of an XDR solution lies in its ability to ingest telemetry and data from across the entire enterprise: cloud, campus, remote, data centre and OT environments, and every managed and unmanaged connected device.
XDR converts telemetry and daily logs into high-fidelity, SOC-actionable probable threats. By automating many of the manual tasks involved in threat detection and response, XDR lessens the risk and magnitude of a successful attack or data breach and eliminates virtually all alert “noise.”
This enables SOC teams to detect, investigate and respond to the broadest range of advanced threats from across the entire enterprise more quickly and more effectively.
In addition to businesses, XDR is also critical for government entities. Government agencies are often targeted by advanced threat actors seeking to steal sensitive information or disrupt critical infrastructure. XDR improves the security effectiveness of government networks and systems, ultimately protecting national security and public safety.
Threat detection is almost entirely data- and rules-driven. More data does not necessarily mean better detection. But better data and data science most certainly do.
Providing holistic approach
The breadth of data – from the device types that characterise your extended enterprise – and the way these sources are processed and managed determines the breadth of threats that can be detected and the quickest time to investigate and respond to them.
XDR automatically enriches and normalises key data, correlating signals to produce a small number of high-fidelity, high-confidence detections that truly warrant analyst investigation.
It simplifies and accelerates complex investigation and threat-hunting processes with more complete, accurate information and contextual data.
Forescout XDR is an open XDR that works with the security solutions you have already invested in increase the value of your existing security investments.
It ingests data from any managed or unmanaged connected device, supports more than 170 vendor data sources, and 12 EDR solutions (including those from Crowdstrike, VMware Carbon Black, SentinelOne, Microsoft, and Trend Micro), along with other leading security, infrastructure, enrichment, application, and cloud sources, as well as Forescout solutions.
Most XDRs normalise data to enable analysis but stop there. Forescout XDR enforces a common information model (CIM) to normalise ingested data, but that is just the starting point.
That normalised data is then auto-enriched at line speed with user info, IP attribution, geolocation, critical asset information, and more. This significantly enhances the value of the data for correlation, detection, investigation, and threat-hunting purposes.
XDR is more than an emerging cybersecurity buzzword; it is already a critical cybersecurity solution, providing a more holistic approach to threat detection and response.
By consolidating multiple security technologies into a single platform, XDR provides organisations with a comprehensive view of their security posture and improves the efficiency of security operations.
For businesses and government entities alike, XDR is essential for protecting against advanced threats and ensuring the security of critical data and infrastructure.
- By Rik Ferguson is the Vice President of Security Intelligence at Forescout.