How XDR Addresses Cyber Threats

What is it about XDR that makes it so well-suited to protect against today’s latest cyberthreats? The answer has to do with the way XDR allows organizations to combine sophisticated modeling of the latest malicious trends and tactics, together with advanced endpoint detection capabilities to sense and stop these attacks from happening in the organization. Let’s examine this powerful combination of XDR capabilities, and how companies can utilize them to get ahead of 2023’s fast-evolving threat landscape.

A Challenging Year of Advanced Cyber Threats
Industry analysis shows that both attack surfaces and hacker capabilities are growing exponentially – including highly-engineered ransomware, business email compromise and identity theft schemes. Furthermore, as new technologies like AI chatbots and deep fakes continue to evolve, so do the ways malicious actors find to exploit these capabilities for more targeted, scalable and deceptive attacks.

Financial data is particularly hard hit. A Deloitte study earlier this year showed that, in the span of just 12 months, more than a third of executives surveyed saw their organizations' accounting and financial data targeted by cyber adversaries. And nearly half of C-suite and other executives expect the number and size of cyber events targeting their organizations' accounting and financial data to increase in 2023.

Fortunately, XDR capabilities give financial firms the capabilities to proactively deal with these stepped-up attacks. The key to XDR’s power lies with the ability of the platform to sense the broader threat landscape; determine where and how these threats are most likely to affect the organization and its endpoints; and then proactively counter these threats and quickly shut down any attempted breach of enterprise systems.

Stronger Protection with XDR
Gartner defines XDR as “a SaaS-based, vendor-specific, security threat detection and incident response tool that natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system that unifies all licensed components.” There are several reasons why this formula is so effective against today’s most pressing latest cyber threats.

To begin with, XDR by definition serves as an orchestration layer for an ever-expanding set of “multiple security products.” That means new products designed to better address today’s threats can quickly be integrated into the XDR toolkit. For instance, a firm using XDR can decide to integrate new AI/ML driven solutions that use contextual reasoning and statistical inferences for predictive threat modeling – information that is pushed to endpoint security platforms in order to mitigate threats with less resources.

XDR is also event-driven and its ability to incorporate behavioral analysis into endpoint detection is vital for sensing and stopping lateral movement within systems, data exfiltration, unauthorized downloads and other behavior-based signs of an attack in progress. Finally, because an XDR platform facilitates both detection and response, organizations equipped with XDR can be more proactive and even automate some parts of the SOC response – such as isolating endpoints, blacklisting attack IP addresses on firewalls and creating DNS sinkholes.

Yet for all the ways XDR is well suited to the cyber threats of 2023, the solution is not plug and play.  Organizations will likely need the help of an IT partner for an MXDR engagement that constantly customizes and tunes the solution to the unique threat profiles and attack vectors that pose the most risk to a particular organization. That same partner can write detection and threat mitigation rules that have the most beneficial impact for that organization. Our next blog post will focus on how to size up the MXDR vendor who’s best suited for the job of protecting your particular firm.