How Cybereason XDR Supports Zero Trust Initiatives

The White House last week released the Federal government’s strategy to move agencies toward a Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity. The document formalizes the Biden administration’s expectations for Zero-Trust architecture at all federal agencies, with deadlines set to meet various objectives by the end of 2024.

Federal agencies now have 60 days to deliver their Zero Trust implementation plans. And while the government seems to be well ahead of private industry in its execution of Zero Trust, the reality is that no two enterprises—whether in the public or private sector—will have the same Zero Trust journey.

Cybersecurity maturity levels vary widely, therefore, choosing the right partner to help your organization realize its zero trust goals with as little friction and disruption as possible will be key to your success.

What is Zero Trust?

There have been many definitions of zero trust over the years and many are simply impractical. Zero Trust is not about denying access by default but verifying trustworthiness on a continuous basis. 

Zero Trust is a security model in which nothing is trusted by default and everything is verified by default through continuous, contextual, real-time analysis across devices (all endpoints), identity, application workloads (including cloud workloads), networks, and data. These core foundations of Zero Trust are supported by behavioral analytics, automation, and orchestration.

So what does that actually mean? It means we treat every user, endpoint, application or workload, and data flow as untrustworthy. It means we assume the adversary already has a presence in the IT environment. And it means we leverage planetary-scale protection, predictive analytics, and automated, guided response options for 10X faster response times.

How Cybereason XDR Accomplishes Zero Trust

The top challenges to establishing Zero Trust environments are similar to the challenges that government agencies and private enterprises face in modernizing as a whole: Complexity of the IT environment; interdependency of existing technologies; and limited budget and staff resources.

Cybereason XDR addresses all of these challenges across the five core pillars of zero trust (device, identity, network, application workload, and data):

cybereason-and-zero-trustThe Cybereason XDR Platform addresses the five key pillars of zero trust.

Complexity of IT Environments

AI-driven Cybereason XDR protects your enterprise with effective security far beyond the endpoint. Through native integrations with email, productivity suites, identity and access management, and cloud deployments, the Cybereason XDR solution is capable of finding undetected signs of compromise to end malicious operations.

The automated correlation capabilities within Cybereason XDR ensure identities, authentication, and authorization to cloud accounts, endpoints, and devices takes a Zero Trust validation model approach to ensure even the deepest threats and suspicions lurking in your enterprise can be surfaced.

AI-driven XDR combines the Cybereason MalOp™, which analyzes more than 23 trillion security events per week to deliver instant detection and incident response, with Google Cloud’s unrivaled ability to ingest and normalize petabytes of data from the entire IT environment for planetary-scale protection. Unlike other XDR platforms on the market, Cybereason XDR powered by Google Cloud analyzes 100 percent of event data.

With native integrations into Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, Cybereason XDR monitors for signs of account takeover and data exfiltration and can protect cloud workloads against emerging threats like exploitation of undisclosed vulnerabilities and zero-day attacks.

Interdependence of Existing Technologies

Cybereason XDR breaks down the data silos that attackers rely on to remain undetected by unifying device and identity correlations for faster, more effective threat detection and response while unlocking new predictive capabilities that enable defenders to anticipate and end future attacks before they begin.

To an attacker, anything connected to the internet is part of a company’s attack surface. Unfortunately, many government agencies and private critical infrastructure owners still rely on siloed solutions each monitoring a specific part of the network.

With diverse and deep integrations, Cybereason XDR delivers enhanced correlations across Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and Indicators of Behavior (IOBs), the more subtle signs of network compromise. Out-of-the-box, Cybereason XDR provides Predictive Ransomware Protection and automatically blocks malicious executions and activity.

Limited Budget and Staff Resources

Infosec teams today are facing burnout and overload from low-context alerts, of which more than half are typically false positives. As organizations expand and add assets and data sources, log management and SIEM solutions struggle to scale and become increasingly cost-prohibitive.

Cybereason XDR provides a unified investigation and response experience that links together the diverse ways we work: on remote endpoints, mobile devices, cloud platforms, and email to prevent, end, and predict malicious operations.

Cybereason XDR integrates with leading firewall and NDR vendors to consolidate alerts, correlate network context with user and asset activity, and enable automated or guided response actions from the XDR console. It also helps organizations save on storage and analytics costs while improving analyst skills with intuitive, extensible threat hunting.

Start Your Zero Trust Journey

The first step in the Zero Trust journey begins with finding the right partner that can continuously monitor and detect malicious behaviors hiding in plain sight behind trusted identities and applications without disrupting or causing harm to IT and the business.

This is where the power of AI-driven Cybereason XDR comes into play. Any organization planning to move to a Zero Trust architecture must first meet the demand for actionable incident response against top threats like ransomware, business email compromise, and account takeover.

Cybereason is dedicated to teaming with defenders to end attacks on the endpoint, across the enterprise, to everywhere the battle is taking place. Learn more about Cybereason Zero Trust here or schedule a demo today to learn how your organization can benefit from an operation-centric approach to security.

Dan Verton
About the Author

Dan Verton

Dan Verton is Director of Content Marketing at Cybereason. Dan has 30 years of experience as a former intelligence officer and journalist. He is the 2003 first-place recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for Best News Reporting – the nation’s highest award for tech trade journalism and is the author of the groundbreaking work, Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber-Terrorism (McGraw-Hill, 2003). He most recently served as an intelligence advisor and co-author of a nationwide TSA anti-terrorism awareness training program.

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