Cybersecurity incidents across the world expose how the threat actions have rapidly evolved over the years
CIOs say that cybercriminals are coming up with innovative ideas to find ways to breach enterprise networks. As security teams strengthen preventive measures, attackers have also updated their attack tactics. They work to develop practices that can breach systems without being detected and boosting successful penetration chances.
The most prominent method of stealthy cyber threats is adversarial machine learning. Such attacks are quite difficult to identify as the attack targets the machine learning algorithm directly.
As a result, the algorithm’s capability to identify intrusions is undermined. At times the compromised algorithm ends up manipulating the system to make it susceptible to the attacks rather than mitigating the attack.
To fight the sophisticated threat action similar to adversarial ML, organizations have to adopt better and more efficient solutions. Standard Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are always efficient, as is clear from previous incidents.
Reactive measures like Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) cannot see through concealed breaches. Such methods are capable of providing layered visibility into masked attacks, but can’t protect systems against attacks.
Enterprises and security leaders are in search of more proactive measures. The solutions need to be capable of detecting hidden complex issues rapidly. It’s required that visibility is offered into data across endpoints, cloud infrastructure, and networks and specific threat factors. Leaders propose innovative cross-layered detection and response solution (XDR).
Understanding XDR
The solution proposes collecting and automatically matching correlating data across various security layers to allow immediate threat identification. XDR monitors potential threats across varied locations or sources within the enterprise.
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Possible attacks can be disguised between security silos. Such silos are generally created due to disconnected solution gaps and alerts resulting from security attack and triaging investigations. They remain undetected due to the limited and disconnected attack viewpoints of most analysts.
XDR helps by eliminating security silos via collated and holistic response and detection strategies. The solution gathers and matches connections of deep activity data across various security layers.
These include the layers configured for emails, cloud, workloads, endpoints, and servers. Varied data is automatically analyzed to identify threats faster and provide adequate time for security analysts to conduct thorough investigations.
Disadvantages of conventional reactive mitigation methods
Security information and event management (SIEM), EDR, and NTA technically are not weak security measures. However, their working mechanism allows hackers with opportunities to exploit continually.
The biggest issue with conventional systems is the alert overload. The traditional strategies end up generating huge volumes of alerts of meaningless context. Such notifications are mostly incomplete and inefficient information that makes no sense to security personnel.
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Very few enterprises collect data that are adequate to take decisive actions. The majority of the enterprises say they collect data from the security systems that allow them only a broad overview of the issue. Specific details and appropriate solutions are rarely obtained.
On average, a prominent organization will have over million security events per day. It is difficult for the Security Operation Center analysts (SOC) to tackle the massive volume of alerts from such security events. This is where the XDR becomes invaluable!
