XDR Best Practices
Like any security tool, XDR can only live up to its promises if deployed and operated correctly. These 7 best practices can help your organization to make the most of its XDR deployment.
#1. Centralize and Integrate Security Data
The average organization has numerous IT and security systems. Each of these can generate logs and alerts that can be useful for identifying and remediating security incidents. However, having this information scattered across multiple tools and locations can decrease an organization’s ability to detect cyberattacks. Modern, sophisticated cyberattacks are subtle and may require the context gained from combining several data sources to identify.
XDR is most effective if it has access to a single, centralized pool of security data. This integration enables the XDR solution to take advantage of context to more accurately identify potential cyber threats.
#2. Leverage Advanced Analytics and Threat Intelligence
Cyberattacks are increasingly sophisticated, subtle, and automated. As a result, a cyberattack may fade into the noise of normal traffic, making it more difficult for an organization to identify and remediate the potential threat.
XDR solutions offer the potential to use advanced analytics and threat intelligence to detect these potential threats. Threat intelligence feeds offer insight into the latest attack campaigns, and XDR solutions that can ingest and leverage these feeds can use them in their analysis to effectively protect the organization from attack.
#3. AI-Powered Correlation
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up new potential opportunities for cyber defense. AI systems are highly effective at analyzing large volumes of data and identifying trends and anomalies.
Applying these capabilities to threat detection and response can enable organizations to discover attacks that would otherwise fly under the radar. Trends and anomalies that humans would miss in a sea of data can be quickly identified by AI, enabling security analysts to more quickly and effectively find and fix potential security incidents.
#4. Foster Collaboration and Communication
Clear channels of collaboration and communication are essential to an effective cybersecurity program. Silos of security data could deprive security teams of the context required to identify sophisticated cyber threats. Poor communication can also slow threat detection and response if the organization struggles to get the right data to the right people at the right time.
If used correctly, XDR solutions can help organizations to break down silos and support the required communication. XDR solutions that draw data from all over the organization’s IT infrastructure can help identify issues in various systems and enable centralized monitoring and management of security incidents.
#5. Regularly Update
The state of the art in cybersecurity is rapidly changing. As new attacks come out, new signatures, AI models, and other tools are developed to help identify and prevent them.
Regularly updating an XDR solution helps to ensure that an organization has the latest tools available to it. This increases the probability that the XDR solution will be able to detect the latest attack campaigns and new tools and techniques developed by cyber threat actors.
#6. Consolidate UEBA
User and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) provide insight into user and account activity. By tracking behaviors, it is possible to detect and prevent cyberattacks based on the attacker’s malicious activities using compromised accounts.
Like other data sources, consolidating UEBA helps to improve the effectiveness of an XDR solution. With access to identity and behavioral data across all of an organization’s IT environments, an XDR solution can more effectively detect anomalous activities that span various parts of an organization’s infrastructure.
#7. Security Automation
Cyberattacks happen quickly, and the faster that an organization can respond, the better. Ideally, this means catching and preventing the attack before it can occur, but shaving time off of incident response also limits the attacker’s opportunity to steal data, move laterally, or perform other malicious actions on an organization’s systems.
When using XDR, it’s important to take full advantage of its security automation capabilities. Replacing manual processes with automated actions can enable an organization to block an attack or contain it to a single infected endpoint before it poses a threat to the rest of the organization.
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