Businesses embracing remote working arrangements require increased layered security for devices and data, including EDR solutions, as part of their protection plan. Security intelligence identifies threats that bypass traditional antivirus and endpoint protection platforms and offers insights into their lifecycle, including how they entered your network, where they reside now, and their activities.
Detection
EDR differs from traditional endpoint protection tools (like antivirus software and firewalls ) by continuously scanning devices connected to the organization’s network for signs of digital threats and attacks, including behaviors that might indicate active attacks on devices connected by them, taking measures to stop threats before further damage occurs.
An EDR solution works by monitoring all operating system events, from processes and other forms of data that comprise them to abnormalities that could indicate possible threats have entered the system, then tracking their lifecycle from whence they arrived in your network to where they went after being active.
Traditional detection methods often miss hidden attacks that elude detection, such as malware. Malware typically comprises two components: the encrypted payload itself and an extractor that takes control of device processes to steal user data for hackers who control it. Malware authors may alter files so they no longer match with what antivirus software recognizes, making it easy for endpoint security systems to miss it altogether.
Recent EDR solutions employ machine learning and AI technologies to quickly scan through vast amounts of unprocessed endpoint device data to quickly identify suspicious incidents and processes, including those that don’t fit pre-configured threat parameters, to provide more accurate event detection with reduced false positive alerts and reduced alert fatigue, thus protecting genuine security occurrences from being missed out by false alarms.
Containment
Once a threat has been detected, it must be contained and eliminated immediately. To achieve this goal, an IT team must collect relevant information about it as soon as possible and create a plan to eliminate similar attacks in the future. For instance, they might need to know how the malware penetrated network perimeters, what applications were affected, which devices it affected, and what data its attackers attempted to steal.
Unified endpoint protection (UEPP) solutions combine these capabilities into one convenient package and offer centralized visibility of security events across on-premises networks, public cloud platforms, and business-critical cloud apps. They’re the ideal way to detect attacks that sneak past preventative measures while providing complete and streamlined incident response capabilities to manage any that slip past detection.
Traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions rely on malicious activity identification and endpoint data monitoring to detect threats missed by other systems, like antivirus and anti-malware solutions. Unfortunately, however, this approach relies on a baseline that may be altered by unexpected behavior; consequently, it cannot accurately predict new attacks, leading to false alarms and resulting in IT teams missing phishing emails and other forms of cybercriminal activity.
Investigation
As cyberattacks evolve and are better at evading detection, endpoint detection technologies must incorporate investigative capabilities that enable IT teams to investigate threats after they breach the perimeter. This may require extensive manual effort in cases involving complex malware that renames itself to hide its true malicious purpose to remain undetected.
As threats enter a network through employee workstations in an office or at home, but also servers, IoT implementations, and cloud workloads – often through employees themselves – endpoint protection is crucial in combatting attackers; attackers tend to target endpoints that are easy to compromise due to security vulnerabilities that are hard to defend against and hard for organizations to defend against effectively. As such, an EDR solution provides one effective endpoint protection strategy.
EDR solutions serve as proactive cyber investigators and fixers, collecting endpoint telemetry and using advanced technology (such as artificial intelligence and machine learning) to analyze it to detect intrusive cybersecurity threats. Information can be gathered from desktops, laptops, IoT devices, and other endpoints, providing a complete picture of the network.
As soon as an EDR solution detects a threat, it isolates it in an isolation sandbox to analyze without harming devices and provide insight into how and where this malicious agent entered your network and what its current activity might be.
Elimination
Once an unwelcome threat is detected, the next step should be to quarantine and eliminate it. This can involve isolating infected files from being downloaded back onto the network or isolating endpoint devices for further analysis; an EDR solution can perform these actions automatically without needing input from an individual stakeholder.
EDR systems not only contain and delete infected files but can also perform analysis that can assist your team in understanding how a particular threat slipped past the defenses of your network – for instance, uncovering weaknesses within its perimeter or how a file slipped by traditional antivirus software.
Traditional security solutions rely on static detection methods for malware; next-generation EDR systems use dynamic methods that detect even advanced attacks like zero-day malware and advanced persistent threats (APTs), where attackers remain hidden on compromised systems for extended periods, waiting until their target arrives to strike their blow.
Current technology lacks the capabilities required to detect and contain these threats effectively. Hence, an EDR and endpoint protection platform (EPP) combination offers preventative and reactive capabilities to mitigate cyber attacks, stopping most attacks before they lead to full-scale data breaches.