It is no longer a question of whether advanced threats will breach your environment but when. EDR helps you quickly detect and respond to these threats reducing dwell time, minimizing potential damage. An EDR solution collects telemetry on each endpoint and sends it to a central system for analysis. This data is correlated and analyzed to identify suspicious activity.
Real-time Monitoring
A good EDR solution can monitor all the activity on your endpoints in real-time, detect attacks that your other tools can’t stop and provide you with the visibility to respond to them quickly to minimize damage. If you’re looking for an EDR solution that can do all of this, have a well-organized list of required capabilities and ask vendors to compare their comparative offerings. EDR can also assist you in spotting unusual activity, even when it seems quite regular, such as when someone enters a valid user ID and password to log in. EDR solutions can analyze file activity, device and perimeter telemetry to look for abnormal behaviors.
You’ll also want to ensure that your EDR security can integrate with other security tools centrally, providing you with central alerting and visibility. It helps you optimize your systems and incident response by giving you the information you need to implement robust processes. A good analogy is the black box recorder on a plane, which records dozens of data points and can be used to determine what contributed to a plane crash so that it can be prevented in the future.
Alerting
An effective EDR solution is like a flight data recorder for endpoints, recording and storing hundreds of security-related events, such as process creation, driver loading, registry modifications, disk access, memory access and network connections. This data enables security teams to “shoulder surf” an adversary in real time, observing the commands they are running and how they move around their environment. With comprehensive visibility of endpoint activities and procedures provided by EDR, security teams can proactively identify threats and take appropriate action before they result in a breach. It reduces the time an attacker can remain undetected in a network (dwell time) and minimizes potential damage to business operations.
The ingested telemetry is then sent to a centralized security management system, which uses machine learning technology to correlate and analyze the information. When suspicious activity is detected, it is flagged and alerted to security analysts and relevant personnel. Automated responses are initiated, as well.
An effective EDR solution combines this information with intelligence feeds from an extensive and continuously updated threat database, ensuring the solution can detect and address even the most sophisticated attacks that bypass traditional tools. The combination of detection and response features helps to reduce alert fatigue for analysts, enabling them to focus on their critical role in mitigating cyber risk.
Response
EDR solutions are designed to assume that a breach has already occurred. They provide full visibility into security-related activity, including process creation, driver loading, registry modification and disk access. It allows teams to “shoulder surf” an adversary in real time, observing which commands they are running and techniques they are using to penetrate or exploit the environment. This intelligence then triggers automated responses such as logging off an attacker or alerting a staff member. An EDR solution also provides forensics tools to investigate threats that do not fit pre-configured rules or to conduct post-mortem analysis of breaches. The right EDR solution will include centralized log management and analysis, enabling security teams to review, analyze and respond to incidents faster. It should also support segmentation, allowing security teams to isolate and granularly control data, applications and services based on priority level. It will prevent attackers from traveling laterally across the network and causing more damage.
The best solutions also incorporate behavioral protection, enabling them to detect attacks evading traditional prevention measures. These solutions use behavioral analysis engines to identify novel and process-based attacks, and they can track lateral movement in the network. They can also spot unauthorized data exfiltration by blocking C2 connections, which prevents cybercriminals from holding your systems hostage for ransom. Lastly, they should provide a web console to enable security teams to manage and triage alerts and perform investigation and response tasks.
Detection
Today’s cyberattacks are incredibly sophisticated, leveraging advanced techniques to penetrate defenses and access sensitive data. Attackers often leverage known vulnerabilities and attack patterns but can also be unpredictable. Organizations need strong endpoint detection and response capabilities to overcome these emerging threats. EDR solutions collect and store event data from individual endpoints, aggregating it in a centralized database and analyzing it regularly to look for malicious activity. The solutions can also integrate with other security tools to enhance visibility and provide threat intelligence.
With the emergence of IoT devices, mobile phones and remote workstations, organizations need to centralize monitoring of these endpoints and other network-connected machines, such as servers and switches. It can prevent gaps in protection. A robust EDR solution can use multiple methods to identify suspicious activity, such as comparing the behavior of individual endpoints with established behavioral baselines – datasets created from events considered safe, such as normal login times or acceptable file access patterns. While EDR can do much of the heavy lifting for security teams, it is important to predefine your team’s actions when an alert occurs. With a strategy in place, security teams may become overwhelmed by the number of false positives that are generated and will be able to respond quickly.
