As threat actors continue to create more sophisticated and clandestine attacks, the capabilities of extended detection and response (XDR) to provide a unified view across your entire attack surface while discovering new and emerging threats has made it the new standard in cybersecurity.
As the name points out, XDR picks up where limited endpoint detection and response leaves off, by extending coverage across your entire computing environment, including cloud, endpoint, network, email, identity systems, exposure management systems, operating technologies (OT), and business applications.
However, there can be a lot of variation in how any particular XDR platform achieves this advanced detection. Understanding the detection capabilities an XDR offers will help you choose the right platform for your security needs.
For advanced detection, here are the three must-have capabilities to look for in an XDR:
1. Diverse Data Sets
XDR should integrate data from all across your existing and future attack surface, providing heightened visibility into threats from a variety of angles within your environment. This results in three main benefits: early detection of emerging threats, faster detection of threats overall, and more accurate threat detection and analysis. By creating a comprehensive and richer view of what all your data is revealing, analysts become more efficient at identifying real threats and weeding out false positives.
2. Detection Logic Based on Four Key Attributes
Detection logic boils down to how an XDR platform takes the telemetry it is receiving and interprets it to determine if a threat is present. With the sophistication of today’s threats, it’s crucial that an XDR’s detection logic have these four attributes:
- Heuristic correlation. This is the ability to identify relationships between multiple pieces of telemetry to determine that some type of malicious activity may be occurring in your environment.
- Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP) specificity. An XDR should be fed by rich threat intelligence that can map the telemetry relationships it discovers to known TTPs.
- Confidence. Alerts should be from real threats, not false positives that just create noise — and more work for analysts.
- Speed. The detection logic should work fast because every second counts during an incident.
3. Continuous Enhancements
The threat landscape is continuously changing. It’s nonnegotiable that an XDR should be continuously updating its platform with real-world threat intelligence pulled from research and what the vendor’s internal threat research team is seeing in actual incidents. Threat actors move fast. Your security platform has to move faster.
You can dig deeper into how XDR provides the next level in detection capabilities, including numerous examples of advanced detection mechanisms across the top three initial access vectors, by reading our white paper Improving Detection with XDR.
The Secureworks Taegis Advantage
Secureworks Taegis™ XDR platform was built from the ground up with all these capabilities in mind. As an open XDR platform, Taegis integrates with your existing technology investments to provide flexibility and a holistic view across your environment that is vendor agnostic. Through machine learning and AI, Taegis offers automation that improves analyst efficiency and uses advanced analytics to prioritize alerts for more rapid response to the most serious threats first. And with constant updates in threat intelligence fed to it from Secureworks Counter Threat Unit™ and our incident response engagements, Taegis is always on the forefront of protecting against the latest threats.