If your organization has ever contracted with a managed security services provider (MSSP) before, you may have learned about threat detection and response. It’s a service that’s designed to continuously monitor your infrastructure to detect and respond to cyberthreats like ransomware and spyware. Threat detection and response is a great way to keep your endpoint devices safe and secure, but did you know you can take that protection further by implementing extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities?
What Are XDR Capabilities?
XDR capabilities refer to a software as a service (SaaS) and managed service-based security threat detection and incident response tool. This tool is able to natively integrate multiple security products (e.g. intrusion protection, network monitoring, and more) into a cohesive security operations center (SOC) that unifies all licensed components. A provider that has XDR capabilities can go beyond typical detective controls by providing a simple, holistic view of threats across your entire technology landscape. Simply put, XDR capabilities provide real-time actionable threat data a provider can use for better and faster outcomes.
How Does XDR Work?
The point of having XDR capabilities is to bring a proactive approach to threat detection and response. It does this by delivering visibility across all data, while also applying analytics and automation to address increasingly sophisticated threats. Additionally, it enriches open source threat intelligence and geopgraphical data. For example, each record ingested in BL King’s XDR SOC is compared against opensource threat intelligence to prioritize the highest threats. With the help of XDR security, your MSSP can:
- Identify hidden threats
- Track threats wherever they are within your IT environment
- Bring out the full potential of your security investments
- Finish investigations more efficiently
The Importance of Adding XDR Capabilities to SOC
A SOC is a team of cybersecurity experts who actively monitor your organization’s ability to operate securely. These analysts are responsible for a variety of activities like maintaining compliance and helping you recover from cyber incidents. One of their most important duties, however, is threat detection and incident response.
As your business continuously expands its attack surface by adding new digital assets, the harder it is for your SOC team to keep track of vulnerabilities and protect your network. It also doesn’t help that cyberthreats are constantly evolving to be more sophisticated and difficult to detect. To prevent cybercriminals from sneaking into your network and taking advantage of exploits, your SOC team needs a platform that intelligently brings together all relevant security data. XDR capabilities provide exactly what your MSSP needs to defend your infrastructure while allowing the team to remain small and agile.
What Are the Benefits of XDR Capabilities?
XDR capabilities can optimize response with advanced context by consolidating multiple security products into a unified security incident detection and response platform. As a result, it is able to provide a number of benefits like:
- Block Unknown Attacks: In addition to known threats, XDR can block unknown attacks with integrated AI-driven malware, antivirus, and threat intelligence.
- Improved Visibility: XDR collects and correlates data from any source to detect, triage, investigate, hunt, and respond to threats.
- 24/7 Automatic Detection: XDR monitors your infrastructure throughout the day. Custom rules can be set to detect advanced persistent threats and other covert attacks.
- Increased SOC Productivity: With faster detection and response, the more time your SOC has to focus on other important cybersecurity processes.
- Less Disruption: XDR makes it possible for your SOC to stop attacks without disrupting users.
- Stop Advanced Threats: With XDR capabilities, an SOC can protect your network against insider abuse, external attacks, malware, and zero-day exploits.
How Do XDR Capabilities Compare to Traditional Detection and Response?
XDR security is a proactive alternative to traditional reactive approaches, like detection and response or security information and event management (SIEM), that provide only layered visibility into attacks. While layered visibility provides important information, it can lead to problems such as:
- Alert Fatigue: Detection and response isn’t able to detect all initial vectors of attack and often sends alerts that are inaccurate or incomplete. As a result, alert fatigue may cause people to ignore alerts that should be investigated.
- Stove Piping: Although last generation SIEM tools do provide visibility, but it’s not enough. The old solution only allowed you to see inside one data source. With XDR, you can correlate between different data sources.
- Time: Complex investigations tend to require specialized expertise. The time it takes to identify a breach using only typical detection and response can be quite long. When it comes to breaches, you don’t have time to wait.
- Total Focus: Detection and response focuses on technology gaps rather than the operational needs of users and organizations. Without a platform to centralize all of your security tools, security teams end up spending too much time maintaining and managing security tools rather than performing security investigations.
XDR is also able to improve critical SOC functions, including:
- Detection: Capable of identifying more meaningful threats by combining endpoint data with a growing list of security controls.
Investigation: It’s able to correlate all relevant threat information and applies situational security context to more quickly assist with the identification of the root cause. - Recommendations: XDR provides analysts with recommendations to further an investigation by providing additional queries. It also offers relevant response actions that would improve the containment or remediation of a risk or threat.
- Hunting: It can provide a common query across a data repository containing multi-vendor sensor telemetry in search of suspicious threat behaviors. This means it allows threat hunters to locate and take action based on recommendations from the platform.
Get SOC With XDR Capabilities From BL King
BL King is a leader in cybersecurity services and solutions. We’re dedicated to helping our clients keep their networks safe and secure at all times. Our SOC solution uses limitless XDR, which unifies the capabilities of XDR SIEM, endpoint protection, and cloud security into one platform. This means we are able to protect and defend your business from cyberthreats effectively and efficiently. With us by your side, you can rest easy knowing your infrastructure is secure.
Contact us today to learn more.
