With cyberattacks taking the enterprise world by storm, protection beyond traditional security mechanisms comes to the fore. Extended Detection and Response (XDR) earns a spot on the list of technologies that fill the void, and for good reason. With machine learning algorithms at its core, it accurately identifies threats and helps respond to incidents in new ways, thereby bolstering the defenses of an IT infrastructure and the digital assets it harbors.
Combined with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as well as Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools, the use of XDR is the best bet for organizations that aren’t mature enough to implement a fully-fledged Security Operations Center (SOC).
For many corporate security teams, XDR is still just another acronym with hardly any hands-on implications. That said, let’s shine a light on the features of these systems and dwell on the ways this growing industry will reshape the cybersecurity landscape going forward.
XDR Technology 101
In recent years, XDR solutions have seen a spike in deployment across the enterprise ecosystem to build and enhance the comprehensive protection of networks, increase the efficiency of incident response, and conduct in-depth cybersecurity investigations. So, what is XDR anyway? What is it for? And what are the ultimate benefits of using this technology?
XDR was created to tackle threat actors’ multi-pronged approaches to infiltrating systems that result in compromising multiple layers of an organization’s infrastructure in one go. It boasts highly accurate automatic detection based on behavioral analysis at all levels: the host, the network, and even in isolated environments. A product like this can flexibly fit into a digital infrastructure and supports effective threat emulation.
There are three major components of XDR:
- Continuous monitoring of endpoint devices, the network, and other sources to record all security events like a “black box” on an airplane.
- Automatic detection of anomalous activity on endpoints and the network based on signatures that are not available to Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems.
- Manual detection, also known as “hunting”, which gives IT teams the big picture of how exactly the attacker has acted.
Is XDR a Product or a Concept?
There are different perspectives on this. Most experts think of XDR as a product. Some consider it to be an overarching cross-product concept that emerged to address the demands of the market and customers in light of increasingly sophisticated and polymorphic threats. Regardless of categorization, it is not so important for the end-user how to categorize XDR as long as it does the protection job properly.
The InfoSec skills gap is one of the reasons the market needs XDR solutions. Such a system allows organizations to automate and unify a plethora of security-related workflows while optimizing event monitoring and metrics, which makes it much easier to ensure a decent level of protection. Top-notch XDR tools support the option to subscribe to extra services, for example, deeper forensic analysis and proactive threat hunting.
“Data Lake” as the Cornerstone of XDR
An arbitrary event is recorded in two databases: one for long-term storage used to parse incidents that took place, say, six months ago; and the other for parsing current incidents. This way, data is amassed from multiple sources and processed quickly. The customer prioritizes the sources they need to monitor, and the vendor can independently collect additional materials. The entirety of this information is referred to as the “data lake”, and that’s the fundamental entity XDR leverages to do its thing.
Choosing an Optimal XDR System
It’s worth highlighting several key points that will help a company make an informed decision when selecting the most suitable XDR solution:
- Incident detection and investigation features are paramount.
- The ease of investigation is important as well due to the large number of datasets accumulated along the way.
- The tool should support different operating systems for maximum coverage of network architectures.
- It makes sense to question the provider’s inner workings in terms of the software development life cycle (SDLC), from design and deployment – to support and maintenance.
Another important criterion is the ability to stretch functionality outside the original IT environment. Collecting data from more infrastructure devices takes detection and investigation to the next level. A tool worth its salt should support integration with third-party systems as well.
From the end-user’s angle, the most important thing is to be able to simply connect all data sources to XDR in a hassle-free way. This amounts to a trio of basic criteria: easy setup, efficiency, and usability.
How Does XDR Detect Complex Attacks?
Generally speaking, the functioning of XDR is based on two components: the host part and the correlation kernel that collects data from the network and the hosts. Different products work differently in terms of the load they put on the host. A common denominator is that all XDR tools efficiently leverage machine learning, which helps identify malware attacks as well as intrusion attempts on the go. The customer can create detection rules of their own, while the vendor supplies additional rules and updates them further on.
Cross-detection is another incredibly important feature of XDR. For example, if a malicious object is extracted from email traffic, the suspicious signature will be automatically blocked on all hosts. The hash of the malicious file flows from one client (as long as it’s not isolated) into a shared database and is then synchronized between all clients.
XDR in the Context of SOC
In most scenarios, XDR can work without SOC, but it all depends on the specific tasks. Using SOC is a must if an infrastructure spans thousands of machines. On the other hand, XDR can be delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Essentially, XDR and EDR are data enrichment tools for SOCs which, in their turn, use SIEM-based systems to operate. In this complex fusion, XDR acts as the main source of security-related data.
XDR can also be effective for organizations that are not yet ripe for implementing SOC but seek to monitor, automate, and investigate cyber incidents. It will maximize the efficiency of these workflows. Plus, it can be a great SOC alternative for some companies.
XDR vs SOAR
First things first, these are architecturally different solutions. The idea behind SOAR is to integrate “everything with everything else”, while XDR helps you respond very quickly and very accurately, automating many processes and facilitating the work of SOC analysts. SOAR can’t perform fast processing of large amounts of data and make decisions based on behavioral analysis.
Additional advantages of XDR include manual incident response options, effective actions at the host level, automatic actions at the level of other systems, and firewall optimization. Unsurprisingly, many companies use both solutions. In the future, these two approaches will likely merge and complement each other. The market’s choice will dot the i’s and cross the t’s in this context.
XDR Market Trends and Forecasts
Most analysts believe XDR will become a mass phenomenon in the next three to five years. Such products are in demand because they are convenient for everyone seeking to have a bird’s-eye view of what is going on inside the IT infrastructure. Vendors will also continue to enhance their XDR tools and will connect more cross-product functions. Chances are that some sort of a hybrid instrument will appear, and everything will be wrapped up in a new marketing shell while the basic concept will remain the same.
Conclusion
XDR solutions appear to be incredibly promising. They are developed by leading vendors in the cybersecurity sector and are a natural evolutionary step in providing comprehensive protection. XDR boasts high-speed processing of large amounts of logs collected from all key infrastructure nodes over any specified period, giving the administrator actionable insights into what is happening inside the perimeter.
By applying behavioral algorithms and machine learning, XDR paves the way toward efficient and timely incident response, a rollback of an attacker’s activity, and the enhancement of defense layers. XDR solutions are fairly pricey to deploy, and yet the cost is lower than that of implementing individual components that will not be linked seamlessly in a single ecosystem.
XDR systems are worthwhile for companies that don’t have a SOC in place but are looking for a professional end-to-end incident investigation solution. It also works well with SIEM / SOAR models already in use, significantly speeding up incident management. In the next few years, the XDR market will go through significant enhancements in response to the growing need for such a comprehensive product among businesses.
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