It’s Time To Add Endpoint Detection and Response Capability to Your Security Portfolio

Cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated every day, as hackers adopt new, evolving tools and leverage increasingly advanced exploits and tactics. As such, it is important for enterprises to move past the traditional security tools, as firewall and antivirus protection is not sufficient for protecting against advanced threats.

why focus on endpoints?

In order to combat the latest cyber crime threats, firms need to start focusing on their endpoints. An endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform provides businesses with the ability to monitor activities across their entire environment, becoming better in detecting and responding to malicious operations. This latest field in the cybersecurity industry offers a key weapon in the war on cyber crime, and can allow firms to significantly advance their strategies for stopping hackers before they do any serious damage.

Lior Div, CEO and co-founder of Cybereason, has discussed the importance of endpoints as the primary point of investigation for a robust security program in the past: “We first tried to develop adversary detection capability that had no endpoint component. However, after thorough examination of the possibilities we came to a clear conclusion - there is no way you can detect a complex hacking operation in real time and get visibility of the hacker activity that is sufficient for an effective response without endpoint visibility. Endpoints are where hacker activity takes place, so they provide an accurate, first hand view of a hacking operation as it unfolds.

Why Antivirus is insufficient

EDRs are commonly referred to as “nextgen antivirus” solutions, as both EDRs and AVs are based on endpoint software components. However, unlike AVs, which base their detection on known signatures and hashes, this emerging category of EDR solutions look beyond signatures. By deploying additional capabilities to spot malicious activities that are not based on signatures, these tools broaden an organization’s detection capabilities.

The EDR field is built on the foundation that hackers have already gained a foothold within a company’s environment. The “not if but when” approach to data breaches means organizations need to invest in solutions that will help them detect attackers that have already penetrated their networks, like the Cybereason platform.

Cybereason was built around the philosophy of adopting the “hacker’s mindset” for cyber security. Rather than waiting for hackers to attack, this platform provides proactive, automated hunting capabilities, enabling companies to detect malicious operations within their environment early in the attack kill chain and develop a better strategy for halting these attacks.

Why choose cybereason?

1. Become a cyber hunter overnight
In the “not if but when” age of cybersecurity, organizations understand the need to become proactive hunters that seek the hacker within. However, few organizations have sufficient talent and skills within their security team to accomplish this. Proactive hunting requires building endless number of queries in addition to a talented incident response team to deal with the countless alerts generated by those queries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported an increasing shortage of security talent across all industries, so your company isn’t alone in this issue.

While most tools require manual query building to achieve proactive hunting, Cybereason has built-in automatic hunting capabilities, enabling security teams to spot any kind of attack, from the simplest signature-based ones to sophisticated, non-signature, new-to-the world APTs. Cybereason is a game changer, it immediately empowers organizations to become cyber hunters overnight.

2. Say goodbye to alert fatigue
We’ve all suffered from sandboxes, SIEMs, and IDS/IPS solutions bombarding security teams with hundreds and even thousands of alerts on a daily basis. Remember the Target breach, when the security team got alerted by their security provider about the malware installed in their environment, but ignored it because they were dealing with 40,000 other alerts at the time of the event? Alert fatigue clearly threatens organizations’ security posture.

Cybereason’s decision making algorithms automatically apply mathematical models and security knowledge to validate alerts and differentiate malicious behavior from false positives, eliminating this notorious alert fatigue. This way. the team is only alerted on real threats, not abnormal, but benign, user behavior.

3. Know immediately what is happening within the attack
On average, it takes an hour for an IR employee to start responding to an alert. We have watched IR teams spend days, and sometimes weeks, figuring out the attack’s root cause, spread, and affected machines just to answer CEO’s simply question of “what is happening?”

With Cybereason, not a moment is wasted on information gathering. Teams can immediately decide on the course of action and act upon it, without spending unnecessary time determining these factors, as they are already laid out for them. Cybereason’s highly-visual incident response console lays out a complete attack story for security analysts, including its timeline, root cause, attack activity, communication, and affected endpoints and users. This allows security teams to see exactly when an attack began, how they were infected, and how much damage has already been done in order to act appropriately.

4. Zero endpoint or network interference
Cybereason was developed with the belief that security should empower, not intervene. Security tools should never interfere with user experience or network performance, as this could, ultimately, make them a burden at best, or a shelfware at worst. This is why Cybereason uniquely designed its endpoint silent sensors to be integrated into the endpoint’s user space, not on the kernel level, and built unique mechanisms of differential sending to ensure user experience, machine stability and network flow all continue unimpeded. This creates a robust data collection mechanism that is completely transparent to the end users.

The Cybereason platform provides a comprehensive endpoint detection and response platform for organizations of all sizes. To learn more about the Cybereason methods of threat detection, including automated hunting and behavioral analysis, click here to request a demo.

Lital Asher-Dotan
About the Author

Lital Asher-Dotan

Lital is a Marketing Team Leader, Storyteller, Technology Marketing Expert. She joined Cybereason as the first marketing hire and built a full marketing department. Specializing in brand building, product marketing, communication and content. Passionate about building ROI-driven marketing teams.