Best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Software

Attackers target many layers of the IT environment, including the corporate network, email servers, and cloud systems. Security teams must build a security toolset that enables effective detection and response to security threats

Extended detection and response helps resolve both security and operational challenges. It is a security solution that:

• Consolidates data from all layers of the IT environment - endpoints, network, email, cloud systems, etc.
  
  
• Provides a single interface for security personnel to review and manage.
  
  
• Automates triage and investigation.

Extended detection and response is designed to help security teams:

• Identify highly sophisticated threats.
  
  
• Identify hidden threats.
  
  
• Track threats across the entire IT infrastructure.
  
  
• Improve detection and response speed.
  
  
• Effectively and efficiently investigate threats.

XDR is not an antivirus.

XDR is a centrally managed security solution that protects networks and all their endpoints from various threats. An antivirus is a standalone security solution that protects the individual system or device it is installed upon from various malware activities.

XDR, on the other hand, is a complete solution with multiple capabilities, including intrusion detection, data encryption, and firewalls, etc. An antivirus works like a subset of XDR that detects and removes malicious files.

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) products monitor events generated by endpoint agents to look for suspicious activity. These solutions also collect data on suspicious activity and improve it with other contextual information from correlated events. However, EDR solutions do not offer integrations with other tools and data sources for full visibility.

XDR provides a wider view, integrating data from endpoint, cloud, identity, and other solutions, allowing for full visibility into an organization’s network and IT environments.

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a key element of the modern security operations center (SOC). SIEM pulls log data from dozens or hundreds of security tools to generate meaningful alerts and provides one interface for security analysis.

This is similar to XDR. However, SIEM only provides a summarized view of security data. This results in a very low level of detail.

SIEM cannot access or process additional information from other security tools to further investigate a specific incident.

In addition, SIEMs don’t have built-in response capabilities. SIEM is a detection tool that can identify security incidents but cannot stop or eradicate threats.

XDR has the following features that SIEM lacks:

• Interaction with security tools: XDR retrieves information related to an incident and using that information, activates defensive measures to deal with that incident.
  
  
• Unified data view: XDR accesses data drawn from multiple security layers, as opposed to the shallow data provided by SIEM. This enables querying and manipulation of in-depth data from security tools, such as cloud system entitlements or endpoint configuration data.
  
  
• Artificial intelligence: XDR uses advanced machine learning and AI capabilities to improve alerting.

Managed detection and response (MDR) is an outsourced service that offers dedicated personnel and technology to help companies improve the efficiency of security operations, threat identification, threat investigation, and threat response.

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) refers to a group of tools used to find and investigate threats to endpoint devices. EDR tools typically provide detection, analysis, investigation, and response capabilities.

Managed detection and response (MDR) solves challenges faced by security teams by strengthening a company's internal security team with external resources and personnel. An MDR service provider will offer an external Security operations center (SOC) that carries out the necessary actions to monitor and protect an organization’s IT assets. An MDR provider will likely use XDR solutions, but they will be controlled by external SOC analysts rather than an in-house team.

XDR solves security challenges by simplifying them and enabling in-house security teams to efficiently do their jobs. XDR unifies visibility across an organization’s security architecture and automates recurring and time-consuming tasks.

Endpoint detection and response tools integrate network, endpoint, cloud, and third-party data to prevent security attacks. XDR tools unify threat prevention, detection, investigation, and response all in one platform. XDR tools detect threats using behavioral analytics to help reveal the root cause of the threats.

Some of the benefits of using XDR tools include:

• Endpoint protection: Block known and unknown threats with endpoint protection. In addition, block malware, exploits, and other attacks with integrated AI-driven antivirus and security intelligence.
  
  
• Data visibility: Collect and correlate data from any source to detect, investigate, and respond to threats.
  
  
• Automatic attack detection: XDR tools provide out-of-the-box analytics and custom rules to detect advanced continuous threats and other covert attacks.
  
  
• Unnecessary alert reduction: Simplify investigations with automated root cause analysis and a unified incident engine, reducing the number of alerts being sent.
  
  
• Threat protection: Protect networks against internal and external attacks, ransomware, fileless and memory-only attacks, and advanced zero-day malware.
  
  
• Swift recovery: Promptly remedy an attack by removing malicious files and registry keys, as well as restoring corrupted files and registry keys using remediation suggestions.
  
  
• Third-party detection and response: Enable behavioral analytics on logs collected from third-party firewalls and consolidate third-party notifications into a unified report for analysis and investigation.

When choosing an XDR tool, here are some features to look out for:

• Single analyst interface: XDR tools provide a unified management workflow across the entire company’s security environment. This allows analysts to review attack stories and investigate incidents across all security silos in one place.
  
  
• Unified visibility: XDR tools enable security visibility in a single dashboard across the network, endpoints, cloud environment, mobile devices, and any other part of the IT infrastructure.
  
  
• Unified management console: Security teams have one central location to manage security configurations and policies throughout the entire IT environment.
  
  
• Integrated platform: XDR tools have off-the-shelf, integrated, pre-tuned detection mechanisms for many types of security data. This enables IT teams to identify threats, investigate them, and respond, all in a short period of time from a unified interface.