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Why Do I Need an EDR Solution?

Why Do I Need an EDR Solution?

Is an EDR Solution required for your cybersecurity strategy? Keep reading to see the benefits an EDR could provide as well as the potential benefit of outsourcing. 

What is EDR?

EDR or Endpoint Detection & Response is rather defined as solutions to store and record endpoint system-level behaviors, block malicious activities, provide contextual information, make use of different types of data analytics to identify and detect unwanted suspicious system behavior and offer remedial measures to restore all affected systems.

Today’s organizations are quite aware of the fact that determined adversaries wait patiently to evade their defenses and gain better access to networks and systems. This will only cause ‘silent failure’ of the standard security solutions as they are unable to detect such intrusions or alert you. Lack of visibility is often cited to be the major culprit for this failure. This challenge, however, can be addressed properly by EDR.

Endpoint detection and response, first coined by Anton Chuvakin, is still a new technology that hasn’t quite reached maturity yet. However, it can be best described as the endpoint security counterpart to SIEM: a solution that focuses on threat detection, investigation, and mitigation of enterprise endpoints and networks.

Endpoint detection and response’s main focus is improving IT security teams’ visibility into relevant endpoints and providing continuous monitoring. But that is the tip of the iceberg of what EDR includes.

Many EDR solutions provide:

+ Endpoint data aggregation
+ Endpoint data correlation
+ Centralized reporting and alerting
+ Behavioral analysis similar to UEBA
+ Centralized data search
+ Forensic investigations
+ Whitelisting and blacklisting for users and entities

Source

EDR Security: Know the key aspects

Effective EDR includesncludess one that includes the capabilities given below:

  • Prevention of malicious activities
  • The threat to data exploration or hunting
  • Detection of suspicious activities
  • Alert suspicious activity or triage validation
  • Incident data investigation and search

Read more about Managed EDR Security.

What is Required in an EDR Solution?

To know what solution is to be derived for the organization, it is crucial to understand EDR’s key aspects and why they are vital! It is essential to identify EDR software that can provide the ultimate protection level without requiring much investment or effort. It should also enable value to the security team, but without draining precious resources.

Some EDR solution key aspects to consider:

  • Threat Database: Telemetry will be required for effective EDR gathered from endpoints and rich in context. Only then will it be possible to use different analytic techniques to mine for attack signs.
  • Visibility: Adversary activities can be viewed with real-time visibility on all endpoints, even if the environment is breached, thereby stopping them instantly.
  • Intelligence and insight: EDR with threat intelligence integration can help provide the necessary context, which also includes details on the attacking adversary or other vital information about the attack.
  • Behavioral protection: ‘Silent failure’ is caused if only IOCs (Indicators of compromise) or signature-based methods are only relied upon, thus causing the occurrence of data breaches. Behavioral approaches will be essential for effective endpoint detection to search for IOAs (indicators of attack). This way, you will be alerted in case, of suspicious activities.
  • Cloud-based solution: Zero impacts can be ensured on endpoints with Cloud-based EDR solutions. It also assures capabilities like investigation, analysis and search are done in real time and accurately.
  • Quick response: EDR which can enable accurate and quick response to incidents can help prevent an attack before it becomes a major breach. This allows the organization to safeguard itself and get back to normalcy quickly.

Read more: Traditional Antivirus vs. EDR

Why is an EDR Solution Vital?

It is without a doubt that with sufficient resources, time and motivation, youhttps://cybriant.com/antivirus-vs-edr/r adversaries are likely to devise ways and means to tackle your defenses, irrespective of how advanced it is. Given below are a few compelling reasons why EDR is to be made part of the endpoint security strategy.

  • Adversaries can be within the network for weeks. They may also return at will: Silent failure will only cause free movement by attackers in your environment. They might create back doors to allow returning at will. It is only a third party that might identify the breach like your suppliers, customers, or law enforcement.
  • Prevention alone will not assure 100% protection: Your organization is likely to remain ignorant due to the existing endpoint security solution. The attackers will only take full advantage of this and navigate within the network freely.
  • There will be necessary access to proper and actionable intelligence to derive the response to such incidents: Besides lacking in visibility, organizations might not know what is exactly happening on the endpoints, not be in a position to record things relevant to security, to store and later recall quickly this valuable information as and when required.
  • Organizations lack the visibility required to monitor effectively endpoints: If a breach is discovered, then you are likely to spend a good amount of time trying to identify what exactly caused the situation, what exactly happened, and how it is to be fixed. This is because of the lack of visibility. But the attacker will only return in a few days before appropriate remedial measures are taken.
  • Remediation can be expensive and protracted: Organizations need to have the right capabilities. Otherwise, they will only spend weeks or even months trying to identify the type of actions to be taken. This might mean reimaging machines that could disrupt the degraded productivity, and business processes, thus leading to serious financial losses.
  • Having data is part of the solution: Adequate resources will be necessary for the security teams to analyze and derive full advantage from it, even if there is available data. It is for this reason, that security teams have become aware of the fact that even after deploying event collection products like the SIEM, they tend to face complex data issues. There also crops our various types of challenges like what to identify, scalability, and speed, including other problems, before addressing the primary objectives.

Conclusion

The EDR market is growing at a tremendous pace over the last couple of years. According to industry analysts, EDR is only expected to grow further at 45% in the coming year 2020, when compared to the 7 percent growth of the cybersecurity market. Hackers these days are gaining easy access to more advanced and sophisticated tools, it is without a doubt that cyberattacks are only increasing with time. Governments and businesses, across the globe, have realized the potentiality and significance of EDR and have started to stop this modern and crucial technology.

The fact is that cyberattacks on endpoints only are found to be increasing rapidly in complexity and numbers. With digitization continuing to transform governments, industries, and businesses, devices in huge numbers are likely to be found online. Presently, only forty million traditional endpoints out of 700+ million are said to have adopted EDR solutions.

Read More: EDR vs. SIEM

Consider Managed EDR

Could a managed EDR solution be right for you?

When you outsource the management of your Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to Cybriant, our security analysts can:

  • Perform root cause analysis for any blocked threat or any other artifact deemed important found on an endpoint
  • Proactively search endpoints for signs of threats commonly referred to as threat hunting
  • Take decisive action when a security incident, or potential incident, is identified

Learn More

The Ultimate Guide to Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

 

PREtect: a Tiered Cybersecurity Solution

Can Traditional Enterprise Antivirus Protect from Unknown Threats?

Can Traditional Enterprise Antivirus Protect from Unknown Threats?

Hackers and cybercriminals have quickly outpaced traditional enterprise antivirus tools. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) security tools provide antivirus features but can help protect an organization’s modern attack surfaces.

Legacy enterprise antivirus also fails to accommodate the modern enterprise’s IT environment. In the heyday of antivirus solutions—not coincidentally also the earliest days of computers—few business processes relied on digital actions or interconnectivity to function optimally. Enterprises didn’t have a digital network perimeter to protect, as endpoints were generally treated and managed individually. Enterprise antivirus solutions were installed on each endpoint with no central administration and were then forgotten about until it was time for their renewal.

As more enterprises undergo a digital transformation—becoming digitized and taking advantage of new online business programs such as cloud storage—the more the decentralized cybersecurity protocol fails to properly secure the IT environment. With the introduction of the mobile revolution and the remote employee—not to mention the increase of computers in everyday enterprise interactions and business processes—the enterprise’s IT perimeter is constantly expanding.

A digital perimeter of this size can be assailed from multiple entryways and attack vectors simultaneously, requiring a consistent and coordinated cybersecurity platform to ensure the highest level of protection. Endpoint security can provide centralized security that compiles security alerts from throughout the IT environment and updates every endpoint’s cyber-protection simultaneously. Only with this cybersecurity can your IT security team be aware of what threats are assailing your enterprise and from where.

In the battle of endpoint security vs legacy antivirus, the former certainly proves superior to the latter for enterprises looking to secure their endpoints against modern hacking tools and tactics.

Source

Many organizations are not comfortable removing their antivirus product completely. Very often, clients will utilize managed EDR security services to determine just how much their current AV has missed. Managed EDR Security solutions can typically augment or replace traditional antivirus security solutions. You’ll have the ability to detect and prevent hidden exploit processes that are more complex than a simple signature or pattern and evade traditional antivirus. Gartner coined the term EDR back in 2013.

Read more, “7 Reasons You Need Managed EDR Security

Enterprise Antivirus: Unknown Threats

An enterprise’s attack surface is complex and ever-changing, and that’s partly because of the constantly evolving modern threat landscape.

Many successful modern cyber attacks stem from previously unknown threats. Because legacy enterprise antivirus solutions often only block known attacks, they are being rendered increasingly ineffective.

Modern organizations will need to be prepared to combat unknown threats with proactive, preventive technology. With the power of AI, unknown attacks can be identified and stopped before they cause harm, actively reducing the enterprise attack surface and saving a business both time and money.

Do you have a handle on the vulnerabilities attackers are increasingly pursuing, and what it takes to protect them?

enterprise antivirus

Legacy enterprise antivirus is no match for unknown threats. Organizations cannot wait for the latest update or a threat to first be discovered, identified, and added to AV. Signature- and behavioral-based solutions that use a defined list are reactive and suited only to block yesterday’s attacks. Today the most dangerous threats are unknown—i.e., custom, brand-new (zero-day), or polymorphic exploits and payloads.

Read More: Traditional Antivirus vs. EDR

To stay ahead of attackers, organizations need dynamic, proactive security that can identify previously unknown threats and harmful payloads before they can execute.

Other common attack surface tactics and how to defend against them

Memory Exploits: Potential file executions from possible unknown malware need to be analyzed in milliseconds before executing in the computing device’s memory. A malicious payload may begin with a benign operation to fool security measures. Analysis should be rapid and deep enough to see downstream malicious actions.

Unauthorized Applications: Application control capabilities are a must as the next line of defense on purpose-designated servers and fixed-function devices. These need constant monitoring to prevent unauthorized apps from running or unauthorized use of a system.

Cloud Assets and Infrastructures: The cloud must not be a weak link in your attack surface. Cloud environments need to be protected from misconfiguration. The same security from on-prem resources must be extended to the cloud to provide consistent protection.

Using an AI-driven EDR solution, Cybriant offers a Managed EDR service that delivers self-contained, automated, machine-learning threat detection modules which uncover threats that would be nearly impossible to find with static behavior rules.

Enterprise Antivirus: Replace with EDR

There is no doubt that organizations stand to benefit from EDR technologies, which enable faster response and remediation of security incidents. According to 451 Research, the right EDR components can greatly augment and complement existing prevention-based security postures. Read the 451 Research report: Expanding Machine Learning Applications on the Endpoint.

Keep pace with the threat landscape. Modern attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) are quickly outpacing legacy antivirus products, rendering them less effective over time. The same will hold for EDR solutions that rely on rules alone. See how AI-powered EDR compares with the traditional EDR approach.

enterprise antivirus

An organization’s attack surface includes all elements that can be used by an attacker to gain control of systems, networks, software, users, and assets. As much as 97% of all malware now uses a polymorphic technique to avoid detection by legacy AV. 1 The attack surface is constantly changing — new users, new systems or software, network changes, and security changes. To gain access, an attacker will look to exploit the weakest link in the attack surface. In an ideal world, security teams would simply reduce their attack surface to virtually zero. However, in today’s hyperscale enterprise environment, where new assets are added as demand dictates, it’s unrealistic to assume that enough action can be taken by the IT team to achieve this.

Attackers Seek the Weakest Link

Organizations want to minimize their attack surface, but realize that the attack surface is constantly growing and changing. Legacy AV is no match for unknown threats. Organizations cannot wait for the latest update or a threat to first be discovered, identified, and added to AV. Signature- and behavioral-based solutions that use a defined list are reactive and suited only to block yesterday’s attacks.

Today the most dangerous threats are unknown—i.e., custom, brand-new (zero-day), or polymorphic exploits and payloads.

To stay ahead of attackers, organizations need dynamic, proactive security that can identify previously unknown threats and harmful payloads before they can execute. It’s time to focus on the bigger picture. An organization’s attack surface is the total sum of all vulnerabilities in a device or network that an attacker can exploit to gain access and compromise the system or environment.

The aim is to keep the attack surface as small as possible and to actively manage all potential areas of vulnerability. But in today’s hyper-scale enterprise environment, where new assets are added as business demand requires, the strategy for managing the attack surface has become ever more unwieldy. Here, we review some of the considerations and best practices for managing your attack surface. Potential file executions from possible unknown malware need to be analyzed in milliseconds before they have an opportunity to execute in the computing device’s memory. A malicious payload may begin with a benign operation to fool security measures. Analysis should be rapid and deep enough to see downstream malicious actions. Application control capabilities are a must as the next line of defense on purpose-designated servers and fixed-function devices. These need constant monitoring to prevent unauthorized apps from running or unauthorized use of a system.

The cloud must not be a weak link in your attack surface. Cloud environments need to be protected from misconfiguration. The same security from on-prem resources needs to be extended to the cloud and provide consistent protection.

Reduce Your Attack Surface with AI-Driven Security Solutions

It’s time to say goodbye to traditional EDR approaches that don’t actively reduce risk and are only capable of slowly reacting and responding to attacks after they’ve been executed.

With evolved, AI-driven Managed EDR security, you will reduce the overall volume of security alerts and cut down on the amount of time required to remediate.

Prevention vs. Detect and Respond