XDR vs. EDR: Which is Better?

Malware, injection attacks, denial of service (DoS), phishing. and a couple of others - they're all a nightmare. That explains why cyber security professionals need to continually defend computer systems against threats. Well, no matter how thorough a security system is, some stealthy threats still manage to be undetectable.

Such threats hide in the cracks between security silos and disconnected solution alerts, spreading as time goes by. Meanwhile, overburdened security analysts attempt to triage and investigate with limited, disjointed attack perspectives. But not anymore, thanks to XDR.

What is XDR?

Extended detection and response (XDR) is a novel threat detection and response strategy that offers comprehensive security against cyberattacks, unwanted access, and misuse. It's comprised of a collection of tools and data that allows for more comprehensive visibility, analysis, and response across networks, clouds, apps, and endpoints.

Unlike Endpoint detection and response (EDR) security, XDR is more sophisticated and advanced. XDR uses a comprehensive approach to detection and response to break down security silos. It captures and correlates deep data activity and detections from cloud workloads, servers, endpoints, email, and networks across many security layers.

As such, threats are detected faster through automated analysis of this superset of rich data. As a result, security analysts are better positioned to do more with their investigations and to act more quickly.

Challenges That Most Security Operations Centers (SOCs) Are Facing Today [And How XDR Helps]

Cybersecurity analysts work in security operations centers (SOCs) to prevent risk and damage to a company. They must therefore be prompt in threat detection and response. These are some challenges they face today:

1. An Overload of Alerts

Did you know that a company with an average of 1,000 employees, can generate up to 22,000 events per second in their security information and event management (SIEM) system? It's no wonder that IT and security personnel are frequently overwhelmed!

They can receive about 2 million incidents per day yet they have inadequate tools for correlating and prioritizing notifications. Security personnel, therefore, struggle to sort out important alerts fast and effectively.

But with XDR, this is improved. It combines a succession of lower-confidence activities into a higher-confidence event, resulting in fewer and better-prioritized alerts.

2. Visibility Gaps Between Security Systems

Many security products allow visibility into activities. Each solution takes a unique approach, collecting and presenting data that is relevant and useful for that job. Data interchange and consolidation are also made possible by integrating security solutions.

The value is however limited by the depth of the data as well as the type of data. This indicates that there are limitations on what an analyst can observe and accomplish.

XDR, on the other hand, gathers and makes a complete data lake available. This includes activity from several security tools, including netflow, metadata, telemetry, and detections. It delivers the whole context needed for an attack-centric view of an entire chain of events across security layers by combining powerful analytics and threat intelligence.

3. Difficulty Investigating

It's difficult to know what to look for when there are so many logs and warnings but no clear indicators. It's also difficult to map out an issue or threat's course. As if that's not enough, it makes it harder to also evaluate a threat's impact across an organization.

Even with the resources, conducting an investigation can be a time-consuming, manual process. XDR however eliminates manual procedures from threat investigations and delivers extensive data and tools for analysis that would otherwise be unachievable.

Take automated root cause analysis, for example. The timing and attack path can be readily seen by an analyst, which may include networks, cloud workloads, servers, endpoints, and email. The analyst can now examine each stage of the attack to determine the best course of action.

4. Slow Detection and Response

Because of all the above challenges, more often than not, threats go undiscovered for far too long. This lengthens reaction times and increases the risk and severity of an attack.

That said, XDR improves threat detection rates and reaction times, which are both critical. As an important performance metric, security firms are increasingly tracking and monitoring mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR). Similarly, they assess the value of solutions and investments in terms of how they influence these indicators and, as a result, lower the enterprise's business risks.

XDR vs. EDR: Which is Better?

XDR is an upgrade in detection and response from the current point-solution single-vector endpoint detection and response (EDR). Without a doubt though, EDR has been of great benefit in cybersecurity. Regardless of its breadth of capacity, however, it's limited.

That's because it can only identify and respond to threats that originate from managed endpoints. This narrows the range of risks that can be discovered, as well as the breadth of who and what is affected. These limitations ultimately limit the SOC's ability to respond effectively.

Similarly, the scope of network traffic analysis (NTA) technologies is restricted to the network and monitored network segments. NTA solutions tend to generate a large number of logs. The relationship between network alerts and other activity data is crucial for making sense of network alerts and extracting value from them.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Augmentation

SIEMs are used by organizations to collect alerts and logs from many solutions. While SIEMs enable businesses to assemble a large amount of data from different sources for centralized visibility, they also result in a large number of individual alerts.

Following this, it becomes difficult to filter through all of the warnings and figure out what's important. With a SIEM system alone, correlating and connecting all of the information logs to create a sense of the bigger context is difficult.

XDR, on the other hand, gathers deep activity data and stores it in a data lake for sweeping, hunting, and investigation across security layers. Fewer, context-rich alarms can be issued to a company's SIEM solution when AI and expert analytics are applied to the rich data set.

In this light, XDR complements the SIEM rather than replacing it. This saves security analysts time in assessing relevant alarms and logs and determining what needs attention and deserves further investigation.

Capability Assessment

Beyond the endpoint, there are other layers of protection. You'll need at least two layers, and the more the better, to undertake extended detection and response activities: cloud workload, servers, network, email, and endpoint.

XDR provides activity data to a data lake from several tiers. In the most appropriate framework, all important data is made available for effective correlation and analysis.

Using a single vendor's native security stack limits the proliferation of vendors and solutions. It also allows for a level of integration and interaction between detection, investigation, and response capabilities that is unrivaled.

Expert Security Analytics and Purpose-built AI

One advantage of XDR you can appreciate is data collection. Besides this, however, the ability to apply analytics and intelligence to enable better, faster detection is crucial. As telemetry collection becomes more common, security analytics when coupled with threat intelligence creates value that allows information to be transformed into insight and action.

An analytics engine powered by native, intelligent sensors provides more effective security analytics than third-party solutions and telemetry alone. Any particular vendor will have a much better understanding of their data than data from a third party. Prioritize XDR solutions that are purpose-built for a vendor's native security stack to ensure optimal analytical capabilities!

XDR: Single, Integrated, and Automated Platform for Complete Visibility

Because you can create logical connections from the data supplied in a single perspective, XDR allows for more intelligent investigations. A graphical, attack-centric timeline view can provide all of the following responses in one place:

• How did the user become infected?

• What was the initial point of contact?
• What else was involved in the attack?
• Where did the threat come from?
• How did the threat spread?
• How many other users are exposed to the same threat?

Conclusively, XDR enhances the capability of security analysts and streamlines procedures. It helps teams work more efficiently by speeding up or eliminating manual tasks, as well as enabling perspectives and analyses that aren't possible right away. When security orchestration and SIEM are combined with automation and response (SOAR), analysts can orchestrate XDR insight with the larger security ecosystem.