What is Extended Detection and Response (XDR)?

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a consolidation of tools and data that provides extended visibility, analysis, and response across endpoints, workloads, users, and networks.  

XDR unifies endpoint and workload security capabilities with critical visibility into the network and cloud—reducing blind spots, detecting threats faster, and automating remediation via authoritative context across these domains. 

Fundamentally, XDR is a consolidation of tools and data, and it represents a major step forward in enterprise security capabilities. Since XDR has access to raw data collected across the environment, it can detect bad actors that are using legitimate software to gain access to the system. This is something security information and event management software, or SIEMs, are often unable to do. XDR performs automated analysis and correlation of activity data, allowing security teams to contain threats more effectively. For example, it can extend to include network detections, lateral movement, anomalous connections, beacons, exfiltration, and delivery of malicious artifacts.

Like EDR, XDR responds to the threat in order to contain and remove it. But, XDR can respond more effectively to the impacted asset, due to its superior data collection and integration with the environment. True XDR platforms provide the holistic visibility and context that security analysts need to respond to threats in a manner that is both targeted and effective. This tailored response helps to contain not only the threat itself, but also the impact of the response on systems. Think: reducing downtime on critical servers. 

There are three parts to XDR: telemetry and data analysis, detection, and response.

• Telemetry and data analysis: XDR monitors and collects data across multiple security layers, including endpoints, network, server, and cloud. It uses data analysis to correlate context from thousands of alerts from those layers to surface a smaller number of high-priority alerts—helping to avoid overwhelming security teams.
• Detection: XDR’s superior visibility allows it to sift through alerts and report on the ones that require a response. That same visibility allows it to create baselines of normal behavior within an environment to enable the detection of threats that leverages software, ports and protocols, and to investigate the origin of the threat in order to stop it from affecting other parts of the system.
• Response: Just like EDR, XDR has the capability to contain and remove threats it detects, as well as update security policies to prevent a similar breach from occurring again. But unlike EDR, which performs this function only on endpoints and workloads, XDR goes beyond endpoint protection—responding to threats across all the security control points it touches, from container security to networks and servers.

XDR’s capabilities above and beyond EDR give it several tangible benefits for securing an organization’s IT environment. These benefits include: 

• Greater visibility and context: Unlike EDR (which is limited to endpoints and workloads) and third-party security services (which often have a limited view), XDR provides a full, 360-degree view of the security environment. It allows security analysts to see threats—even those that leverages legitimate software, ports and protocols to gain entry—on any security layer, as well as how an attack happened, the blueprint, the entry point, who else is affected, where the threat originated, and how it spread. This additional context, as well as the analytics required to make sense of it, is crucial to a speedy response to threats.
• Prioritization: IT and security teams often struggle to keep up with thousands of alerts generated by their security services. XDR’s data analysis and correlation capabilities allow it to group related alerts across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, prioritize them and surface only the most important ones. 
• Automation:XDR’s use of automation speeds up detection and response and removes manual steps from security processes, allowing IT teams to handle a large volume of security data and carry out complex processes in a repeatable way.
• Operational efficiency: Instead of a fragmented collection of security tools, XDR provides a holistic view of threats throughout the entire environment. It offers centralized data collection and response that is tightly integrated into the environment and broader security ecosystem.
• Faster detection and response: All these advantages add up to a more robust and effective security posture. XDR’s added efficiency allows it to detect and respond to threats faster—which is crucial in today’s security landscape.
• More sophisticated responses: Traditional EDR often responds to a threat by quarantining the affected endpoint, which is fine when that endpoint is a user device—but could pose a problem when a critical server is infected. XDR’s more sophisticated capabilities and greater visibility allow it to tailor the response to the specific system and leverage other control points to minimize the overall impact.