XDR Key Benefits and Use Cases
Security analysts are the lifeblood of your organization’s operational safety. Unfortunately, security leaders can sometimes look for new tooling to patch over the issue, rather than spending the time listening to their analysts’ own concerns.
A 2022 study conducted by Tines found that 72% of security analysts experience a degree of burnout – with tedious manual work being listed as the top frustration across the board While understaffing does still play a role, the chief contributing factor to overwhelming burnout is the manual tasks that hold analysts back from contributing to the high-impact projects they care about.
It’s time for security tech stacks to change – from isolated, vendor-locked software with little to no flexibility, to open systems that swiftly integrate with whatever already works for you. A focus on automation will enable your security staff to stop chasing manual detection tasks and focus their efforts toward more productive upstream tasks.
This article will cover the major XDR use cases, and illuminate a new approach to the hundreds of alerts flowing into your analysts’ workflows every day.
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Why Do You Need XDR?
Today’s security landscape is dominated by the unchecked expansion of services, instances, and assets. Particularly rampant in the domains of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the ease and rapidity with which infrastructure can be deployed has left SOCs battling through an incomprehensible fog of transient cloud resources.
From a security perspective, cloud and application sprawl can leave major gaps in even well-established security postures. Across endpoints, email, networks, and applications, each component that keeps your business well-connected and efficient now demands a higher degree of protection than ever before.
Why Endpoints Need XDR
With the rise in remote and hybrid working over the last few years – and an expected increase into 2025 – the number of endpoints under every security team’s protection has swelled relentlessly. Attackers are more than happy to make the most of this; Verizon’s latest report on data breaches shows that cyberattacks now occur every 39 seconds, a third of which specifically target endpoints via malware installation
While endpoints represent the largest attack surface at an attacker’s disposal, conventional antivirus programs identify fewer than half of all cyberattacks. These solutions operate by matching file signatures within a suspicious download against an ever-updating database compiled from newly discovered malware signatures. However, this approach fails to recognize malware that hasn’t been previously identified. This leads to a critical delay: the time from when new malware is released to when it is finally detectable by traditional antivirus methods.
Why Email Needs XDR
Email stands out as a significant security risk because it’s a communication tool used across almost all levels of an organization: its ease of access on any device without the need for decryption makes email accounts particularly high-risk.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is among the most challenging attacks to detect. It leverages the isolated operations of company departments, with bad actors often targeting HR departments to gather initial dregs of information. This information is then used to craft more convincing phishing attacks. The threat extends beyond unauthorized account access; emails sent across networks and servers, many of which may not be sufficiently protected, are at risk. Thus, even if an individual’s computer is secured, the email transit routes may not be, leaving them vulnerable to attacks.
Additionally, cybercriminals can easily manipulate email identities or modify the content of emails, including text, attachments, URLs, or the sender’s email address. This vulnerability stems from the inherently open design of email systems, where each email’s metadata divulges its origin, destination, and other details. Attackers exploit this feature by altering the metadata to make the email seem as if it’s sent from a reliable source, when in reality, it’s a deceit.
While email and other messaging tools are a significant risk factor, most security solutions today remain completely disconnected from them – leaving a gaping hole at the root of many attack stories.
Why Networks Need XDR
Network security operates on dual fronts: the network’s outer perimeter and its internal structure. On the perimeter, security mechanisms aim to block cyber threats from penetrating the network. However, since attackers can occasionally breach these defenses, IT security teams implement safeguards around internal assets, including laptops and data. This approach ensures that, even if intruders infiltrate the network, their movement is restricted.
While fantastic on paper, the reality of compartmentalized security measures is less sparkling. By isolating the various segments of a networked environment, organizations then require separate management. As a result, threat intelligence remains deeply siloed – leaving security analysts to manually piece together the individual data points. And while workflows and data seamlessly transition between different network ecosystems, the organizational culture that shapes these systems often maintains the same strict boundaries.
In these settings, uniform oversight and management are nearly impossible. The sheer volume of network threats and alerts means that the labor-intensive task is a constant drain on limited organizational resources.
An XDR solution consolidates threat information by integrating data from the variety of isolated security tools within an organization’s pre-existing tech stack. Learn more about why Stellar Cyber deploys XDR for enterprises and see how this integration facilitates a swifter and more effective process for threat investigation, detection, and response.
XDR Benefits and Use Cases
XDR offers a way to fit your pre-existing security tools into a wider and more cohesive whole. Attackers don’t segment your security posture into neat little areas – so why should you? Below, we take a look at 7 XDR use cases, from the perspectives of both visibility and response.
Visibility
Even with an entire suite of security tools at your disposal, visibility can’t be taken for granted. True threat visibility means your security staff can understand not just raw alerts – but how they connect to your wider security posture. Transforming alerts into visibility used to require a team of highly-caffeinated analysts – but with XDR, the same people can focus their efforts on the whole attack path, rather than piecemeal alarms.
1. Malware Detection
Security products can only successfully sniff out malware on the assets under their domain. With endpoints being such massive targets, the reality of a single unprotected asset that’s slipped under the radar is closer than anyone would like to imagine. XDR locks in endpoint visibility by integrating with cutting-edge endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities. EDR has already helped bring cutting-edge visibility into the endpoint space by providing agents for every endpoint. This allows log data to be tracked at the edge, but the increased degree of endpoint-specific data is useless unless it’s actually ingested and acted upon appropriately. This is where XDR represents a further evolution of EDR, by analyzing the constant stream of endpoint data and connecting it up to other forms of threat intel in your tech stack.
The same ability also helps keep employee inboxes safe from malware distribution. The distributed pattern of payload deployment has kept traditional solutions stumped, but XDR’s user behavior analytics help track an entire attack path from a device’s or network’s POV. XDR’s advanced behavioral analysis perpetually scrutinizes the activity of both users and endpoints, offering real-time defense against harmful actions by correlating ongoing activities with evolving patterns of attack.
With XDR, the destructive impact of a malware attack can be spotted before its deployment, and indicators of an imminent malware attack can be acted upon in the nick of time.
2. Ransomware
Ransomware attacks are not as rapid as many initially assume: while the precise encryption process is over in seconds, the process of gaining initial access, moving laterally within your network, and evading current defenses all represent key opportunities to disrupt a planned kill chain. With time of the absolute essence, it comes as no surprise that XDR systems help accelerate pre-encryption ransomware detection.
As a baseline form of defense, an XDR’s continuous behavioral analysis can flag unusual file or account access patterns. As a potential attacker then deploys lateral movement tools such as Cobalt Strike, the degree of criticality assigned to these new alerts becomes increasingly loud. As an attack draws towards its end stages, a compromised user account may begin evading your defenses by altering log files and attempting to disable security features. When relying solely on isolated toolkits, the only way to build a complete picture of what this attacker is doing is via your security analysts. But when they’re bogged down under the weight of unrelated alerts, they’re highly unlikely to notice in time.
By detecting, correlating, and focusing your analysts’ efforts on these early signs, XDR can initiate a response before the ransomware completes its encryption routine.
3. OT Security
4. Account Compromise and Insider Threats
In the current remote work era, employees enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere, at any time. This presents a significant challenge for security teams when trying to distinguish between legitimate logins and suspicious ones. Understanding each employee’s “normal” behavior patterns is essential to identify anomalies. This requires technology that can adapt and learn what typical activity looks like for individual users. XDR systems go a step further by establishing a baseline of normal activity for each user, making it possible to spot irregularities like odd login times, access from unusual locations, or atypical data access patterns that might indicate an account compromise.
Alongside behavioral analysis, a comprehensive security strategy must involve multiple layers. XDR tools once again allow unusual data movement to be monitored across the network. If an insider attempts to exfiltrate sensitive data, XDR’s network visibility can add further weight to the alerts being channeled to the security teams.
Response
While visibility is the foundation of security success, your security analysts must still respond and react – often within intensely short timeframes. XDR provides immediate support in this, by totally re-negotiating how alerts are fed to your team.
5. Single Platform, Hundreds of Contexts
With time of the essence, your analysts shouldn’t be wasting any on manual alert checks. Compounding this time sink is the demand to constantly switch between systems, which can muddy the waters even further. Part of XDR’s strength is its offering of a single unified platform. Instead of analysts having to handle individual alerts, XDR groups and correlates alerts into wider incidences. Each of these is then issued a degree of severity, depending on the type, number, and criticality of its underlying alerts.
This places security’s signal-to-noise ratio in a completely different ballpark: by baking in every single relevant piece of context, incidents are investigation-ready as soon as they hit the dashboard. Supporting each stream of data is an ongoing ML algorithm that funnels cutting-edge expertise into actionable insight. For example, a newbie analyst may not know that ransomware attackers sometimes switch off Windows’ Shadow Copy service ahead of encryption. This is to stop victims from easily reverting to backups. Now – thanks to XDR’s backbone of behavioral analysis – analysts are able to see the intent behind wider paths of attack, from a single intuitive interface.
6. Choosing the Least Disruptive Response
With analysts able to regain control over the alert streams, they are then afforded a higher degree of control over their defensive actions. This is particularly important in the field of OT security, as blanket responses are considered far higher risk. While securing day-to-day IT components is relatively low-risk, OT suffers from the fact that cyber systems play an intensely critical role in physical processes. One inappropriate response or false alarm can lead to production shutdowns that disrupt an entire week’s worth of output.
XDR provides a far more precise form of protection by integrating detailed endpoint status data into the resolution options at an analyst’s fingertips. Detailed configuration settings are now accessible thanks to the tight EDR integration, and therefore more precise response actions become available. As a result, analysts are granted the tools and time to adequately choose the least disruptive option at their disposal.
7. A Stop to Lateral Movement
During the lateral movement stage of an attack, attackers employ various tools and methods to transition across different systems. Their objective is to access vital resources, such as Active Directory, enabling them to compromise the entire domain broadly. This phase involves numerous suspicious actions, including establishing remote services, setting up scheduled tasks remotely, accessing the remote registry, and conducting reconnaissance on user or domain information. XDR presents a visual representation of the process tree, highlighting the techniques detected on the endpoint throughout these maneuvers.
By examining and linking the diverse activities associated with lateral movement, we are able to determine the relationships among compromised systems. This analysis helps construct a detailed narrative of the attack’s progression and its dissemination throughout the network. Such critical understanding greatly improves our ability to respond to incidents and strengthens our defenses against complex and multifaceted cyber threats.
Take the Next Step to Automated Network Detection & Response
XDR has already brought many organizations closer to a locked-down network. However, many tools still demand an immense amount of time to configure and set up. Stellar Cyber’s multi-faceted security tooling takes an analyst-first approach, and removes the over-complex integration demands that plague so many security tool wind-ups.
Taking out the high demands to fine-tune products, Stellar’s open XDR is compatible with all existing security measures, including many NDR and XDR systems, freeing organizations from contractual lock-in to any single vendor. This allows your security tools to tightly conform to your organization’s own unique contours. From integration and beyond, Stellar’s XDR solution offers unmatched digital safeguarding potential. Our XDR capabilities are designed not just to detect and respond to threats across your network, endpoints, and cloud environments but also to proactively manage and mitigate risks before they escalate.
Explore the cutting-edge capabilities of Stellar Cyber’s XDR solution and see firsthand how it can transform your organization’s security posture. Embark on a journey towards a more secure, resilient digital future today and discover more about our XDR platform capabilities.
