Detecting threats requires strong prevention, which should be the first pillar of any endpoint security strategy. Preventative technology can stop sophisticated attacks, while EDR solutions assume a breach already has occurred to monitor and analyze suspicious activity continuously.
Automated Response
An endpoint threat detection and response is a security solution that monitors your organization’s endpoints (computers, laptops, tablets, servers) to identify threats and respond quickly. It includes tools that automatically detect malicious activity, contain the threat, stop it from spreading, and roll back any damage caused.
Threat detection is at the heart of an EDR solution because it’s not a matter of whether advanced threats will penetrate your environment; it’s simply a matter of when. Effective detection requires multiple techniques, including behavioral analytics and machine learning algorithms.
Software agents installed on your endpoints collect telemetry data and send it to a central EDR platform for analysis. This massive amount of data can be analyzed in real-time to detect suspicious patterns or indicators of compromise. An integrated threat intelligence feed can also add context to this data, such as revealing the attribution of the adversary and information about their attack vectors. This allows you to respond quickly by identifying the threat and implementing preconfigured rules designed to recognize it and take action accordingly.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring keeps track of IT systems and sensitive networks to spot any unauthorized activity or security threats. This type of monitoring is essential to prevent incidents that can lead to disaster, like a data breach or system downtime that disrupts business operations and damages company credibility.
Adversaries are always working on new ways to break through security defenses. Human analysts can’t stay “on” and review every potential threat that could occur, which is why technology is vital. Continuous monitoring solutions collect and analyze information in real-time to identify vulnerabilities, suspicious behavior, and security incidents.
The first step in implementing continuous monitoring is choosing the right tools and technologies that will work with your existing IT setup and security rules. Next, you’ll need to determine your monitoring frequency—once a week, once a month, etc.—and set objectives and KPIs to measure success.
Threat Intelligence
Detecting threats once they get through an organization’s perimeter is critical to reducing the dwell time of attacks and mitigating the impact of breaches. EDR solutions use real-time visibility into system activity to look for malware or suspicious activity. They also monitor file and log changes, user actions, and network connections.
When these tools detect threats, they notify relevant stakeholders and trigger automated responses according to pre-configured rules. Threat intelligence increases the power of these systems by adding context to raw threat data, such as how a particular type of attack works or what kind of repercussions it could have on business operations.
There are four types of threat intelligence: tactical, technical, operational, and strategic. Tactical intelligence identifies simple indicators of compromise, such as bad IP addresses, known malicious domain names, and suspicious traffic. This intelligence is easier to automate and may have a shorter lifespan. Operational intelligence focuses on adversarial capabilities and provides information about an attacker’s methods, motives, and intent to penetrate security systems.
Data Loss Prevention
Known as EDR, this solution is part of a cybersecurity platform that provides advanced threat detection and response for individual endpoints. This complements antivirus software and focuses on behavior-centric analytics to detect and respond to threats that antimalware tools miss.
Attackers can gain unauthorized access to endpoints by exploiting weaknesses or vulnerabilities in hardware, software, or firmware or by social engineering tactics such as phishing attacks or stolen credentials. They can then download malware or ransomware that encrypts files and renders them inaccessible until the attacker demands payment for their services.
Data loss prevention (DLP) prevents data breaches and exfiltration by monitoring for sensitive information and preventing it from leaving the network. This includes ensuring employees cannot accidentally send sensitive or critical information outside the organization through email, consumer cloud storage services, or collaboration applications.
DLP also protects data in motion by blocking actions that are not authorized and by encrypting data at rest on endpoints or in the cloud. This reduces the risk of accidental or malicious data loss and ensures compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Data Encryption
It’s not a question of if an advanced threat will enter your network, but when. Your EDR solution must guard against these threats proactively so you can detect them and respond quickly to minimize the impact of a cyberattack and protect data.
Detecting advanced threats requires continuous monitoring and various analytic techniques that can identify suspicious behaviors. Using machine learning, predictive analytics, and a behavior-based approach, an EDR system can search for indicators of compromise (IoCs) and find hidden patterns that signature-based approaches would miss.
Once a threat is detected, the EDR tool can contain it, preventing it from spreading to additional endpoints and causing a wider breach. Effective containment includes:
- Isolating the compromised device.
- Removing access to sensitive data.
- Blocking malicious activity on it.
EDR solutions can also include forensics tools that help with the post-mortem of a threat to understand how it got into your network and improve security measures in the future.