XDR: Integrating the Security Stack [Updated 2024]

• 12 August, 2023
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Many issues can arise from a security stack that is fragmented.

Security workers are overworked looking for false positives, security professionals frequently don’t have the background information they need to address security problems quickly and efficiently, and explicit security concerns are regularly dismissed out of exhaustion.  Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions have several advantages, but one of the most important features is how they attempt to integrate the security stack when provided access to and understand your security stack’s overall context.  This section explores how XDR unifies everything.

Detection Analytics

Detection analytics takes into account both what you are learning and what you are seeing.  Dealing with danger and determining how to deal with equivalent risks in the future are essential components of successful security operations (SecOps).  This is frequently more important than searching for software flaws comparable to those you’ve seen in a specific piece of malware that might infect your computer again, or you can take the past into account.

Being aware of the attack strategies and routines used by attackers is useful information.  Both attack kinds and attack methods are changing.  Good detection analytics take care of these two problems.

XDR platforms’ detection analytics capabilities are developed upon integration.  The main sources that XDR is researching and gathering data from are as follows:

Security teams can view all of these components at once, including how they interact, where things moved, etc., because of XDR.  Let’s examine how this connection alters the information security teams can access and the way they work.

Aggregated threat intelligence and visualizations

A collected view of threat information is an essential part of many XDR solutions.  In the event of a security concern, the main component of it is accessible visualizations of essential security data.  According to the platform, this takes on an entirely distinct look.

Because XDR stretches from the endpoint to the security team, the technology may provide security specialists with a complete view of the problem.  Check the endpoint (or endpoints) that might have been the breach point and the notifications that informed you of it.  The resources that the attack might be affecting should also be taken into account.

The volume of data that XDR platforms analyze and their capacity to organize it make the process of gathering threat intelligence in this setting effectively a real-time audit.  You can see the relevant details on security following the event.

All of this data is sent to security employees via a number of XDR platforms; however, there are a few common ways to provide security data:

Since the security requirements of different companies vary substantially, flexible surveillance and threat intelligence are crucial.  Over time, dashboard components commonly show security issues.  Line graphs depicting the frequency of network infiltration efforts over the preceding 6 months or the turnaround times for malware detection and eradication are a couple of examples.

Security teams can examine a breach from start to finish, from where it was to where it is now, and what it might affect along the road, thanks to XDR’s mapping tools.  This point is so important that it will soon get its own section!

Correlating and contextualizing

The context and correlation visibility of XDR is its less-than-secret weapons.  Before we go any further, here are some useful definitions of terms used in the subject of IT security:

The “why” of a security issue is revealed via context.  When putting security issues into context, it should show the possible outcomes of an attack or a repair.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) For Dummies, Cisco Special Edition.  The owner of these documents is John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  Any dissemination, distribution, or use of this material without permission is strictly prohibited.  Correlation ought to be used to deal with the “where” of a security concern.

Because XDR platforms focus on the endpoint and advance from there, the security tools that jointly make up the ecosystem will be clear.

A lack of in-depth knowledge of an attack’s overall impact on endpoints, networks, and apps makes threat assessment and mitigation difficult.  Nowadays, IT security breaches are challenging because of three main issues.

• The number of potential points of attack has increased more than before.
• Attacks have evolved to become more complicated and sophisticated.
• Due to these additional challenges, security stacks have gotten increasingly complicated.

To help security professionals tackle these new issues, XDR systems significantly depend on visualization.  XDR threat mapping capabilities demonstrate the relationship between several systems that are either directly or indirectly involved in a breach.  As an example, malware is found.  On an endpoint laptop where the malware had been identified employing a threat map, an employee opened an attacker’s email.

Let’s examine a hypothetical situation.  If, for instance, there is a major planned input/output spike in the midst of the night, a simple alert trigger won’t have all of the data.  Even if the action is not at all unusual and is actually very important to the business, an alert may nonetheless be raised.  With a bigger context, security teams and their alarm systems will be able to comprehend why things are happening.  False positive threats are a time and energy drain, and they can even make teams less alert, making them overlook serious dangers.

Correlation and contextualization abilities so give security teams a complete picture.  The second question is: What do you decide to do in response to what you see?  A malicious email was opened by you.

Threat detection and reaction planning

Threats are easier to identify because of the context and correlation powered by XDR.  The time required to locate an attack and determine its wider ramifications is sped up thanks to XDR, but it also immediately changes how security specialists approach a threat.

According to XDR’s full-stack approach and the extensive security histories teams may gather, abnormalities can be identified as anomalies.

Regular business activity could be evidenced by a spike in activity on Server A followed by a spike on Server B.  Your security systems can identify this pattern when they are working together, and you may use this knowledge to prevent similar assaults in the future.  What if Server A is quiet while Server B experiences a spike in activity?  This behavior will be recognized by XDR as unusual, and a reaction will be initiated.

Analytics also helps people react more quickly.  Check the hacked Server B again.  On Server B, an application with an acknowledged flaw might be installed.  Once the security team locates the issue server, they may quickly check for known problems with this program and then fix it if necessary.

Security teams become smarter and more responsive thanks to detection analytics.  Server B may be sending information to Server C that is essential to the business’s operations while it is being attacked.  Server B is unable to be halted or interrupted as a result.  Since they are fully informed, security professionals are aware of this and can develop a new plan without interfering with important business operations.

Investigation Remediation

Threats can be identified all day long, but if you don’t address them, they won’t be very useful.  The goal of XDR is to make it simpler to pick and use the optimal remediation strategy out of all the available options.  The two main ways that XDR improves investigative remediation are by supporting the Security Operations Centre (SOC) staff and by boosting incident-tracking capabilities.  The consistent overwork of SOC staff has an impact on security.  XDR can lessen the strain by streamlining and simplifying a variety of crucial security tasks.  Incident tracking has been considerably improved by the installation of XDR.  Attack history tracking is one of the greatest tools for security teams because of the security consequences.

Support for SOC

• SOC employees must operate fast and aggressively to remain abreast of the changing threat landscape.  Tragically, many security goods still fall short of the actual SOC standards.  Stress for security personnel as well as alert fatigue from missed threats, might result from an inefficient security stack.
• The single most important addition made by XDR to SOC operations is the unified dashboard.  The dashboard is frequently used by XDR platforms as one point of access to unified security information from all tiers of defense.  This frequently includes customizable information panels, alert histories and logs, and visualizations.
• This seems like alert fatigue might turn into dashboard fatigue, but since these critical views are changeable, that shouldn’t happen.  Exactly what you want to see must be set up.
• Custom analytics solutions make it simpler to organize responses to incidents, lower false positives, and conduct SOC operations more successfully by supplying context for a security issue.
• Another important set of innovations that XDR provides from the perspective of the SOC is orchestration automation.  Because they are professional, knowledgeable security specialists, burdening the SOC team with tasks that might have been mechanized would be a waste of their time.
• A hacked endpoint laptop can be immediately blocked out of your network with the right automated triggers.  It would take longer to complete this activity because human labor is slower and more effective elsewhere.  The best course of action is to start by taking into account the needs of others while making difficult plans and decisions.

Incident tracking

Another benefit for teams working on remedial security is attack history.  XDR platforms offer specialized dashboard components or, sporadically, separate dashboards for tracking and recording previous security incidents.  It may also be tracked by attack type, such as by listing all DDoS attacks, or by the system, such as by showing information leaks and network attacks separately.

Understanding assault patterns can give you valuable insight into upcoming attacks.  If a breach is identified and displays behavior that teams have seen previously, potentially several times, they will be able to deal with it much more quickly.

Having a history of prior attacks can help to build an organizational understanding of typical attack types and patterns.  It is vital to combine threat intelligence from internal and external sources in your past perspective and add appropriate expiration dates for that intelligence, especially in the case of IPs, which can readily switch ownership and leave an essential asset on the “block list.” This is especially true of IPs, which can easily change ownership.  For IPs, this is especially true.  SOC teams are better able to identify frequent threats and respond to them because of the body of knowledge security professionals have built up for themselves.

Let’s go back to the situation of the irreparably doomed Server B and assume that the activity increase on Server B is found to be a threat.  Using data from previous attacks; security professionals can determine the form of activity occurring, its previous and current trends, and know precisely what sort of attack it is, as well as having a good idea of where it is coming from.

The actual responses are also included in this historical data.  If a previous instance of this kind of assault occurred, security teams have previously dealt with it.  Finding problems should just be one aspect of tracking events; another aspect should be figuring out how to deal with these issues more skillfully in the future.

When fraudsters try to sell you malware, make lemonade.  Use the history of security incidents to learn as much as you can.  Attacks are terrible while they are occurring, but after they are finished, they turn into useful security measures.

Automation Orchestration

The orchestration automation offered by the XDR platforms allows the automation of actions that may require information from numerous security layers.  In addition to carrying out the actual automation duties, this calls for integrating a number of security solutions so that jobs can take advantage of diverse security viewpoints.

Including a variety of security technologies

• Despite the complexity of the various security tools that make up a security stack, linking them via XDR can simplify automation scripts and tasks.  Automation is significantly more challenging when there is a lack of context, as it is with many other SOC duties.  A full-stack approach can be used to design automation jobs with more complex, sophisticated triggers that respond to genuine threats more rapidly and reliably.
• Automation within a soloed endpoint system may only identify some endpoint assaults without having access to network security and incident response monitoring.  The use of orchestration technologies only improves the efficacy of security responses throughout the stack.
• Make sure the solution won’t make the problem worse.  AVOID drafting original, on-the-spot scripts for each new response.  Security personnel shouldn’t have to handle additional duties like software upkeep.
• Another problem is the upkeep of the automation algorithms themselves.  Automation activities typically require childcare in isolated situations.  Software updates, compliance adjustments, and changes to security tool configurations can all interfere with the use of ad hoc scripts.

Automated responses

Even while you have extensive knowledge and cooperation, what can automation actually do?

• When employing XDR, security teams can automate tasks more precisely than they could possibly be able to with conventional security solutions.  XDR automation duties depend on the safety stack range and attack experiences since they are adequately informed blueprints for how Attacks will be carried out.  Send the correction on.  In this situation, it might include cutting the hacked endpoint off from the rest of the network before executing antimalware software on it.
• Look at an example of an endpoint: On one endpoint, malware has been discovered to be active.  In response to this kind of attack, security staff created an automated job that performs a specific set of tasks in an effort to start remediating the situation.  In this situation, it might include cutting the hacked endpoint off from the rest of the network before executing antimalware software on it.

Conclusion

In the bottom line, we would like to state that we have implemented delivering every short to major detail related to XDR Solutions.  Moreover, if any person or organization is willing to take the world-class XDR Solutions in Singapore by the Best XDR Solution in Singapore — ShieldXDR, a unit of Craw Security, the Best VAPT Solutions Provider in Singapore, one may call our hotline mobile number +65-93515400.