Endpoint Detection and Response; beginners guide
According to the reports, cyber-attacks targeting small-scale businesses are increasing at a significant rate. To be precise 65% of small businesses were found to be attacked by cyber criminals last year. Understanding this outbreak, most organizations have implemented endpoint security software to protect their networks.
Even though the security has been strengthened, cyber-criminals are deploying new ways to crack the wall and get into the network. Experts have addressed this issue and they have developed a new technology that can block the threats that sneak through your defenses; Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR).
What is Endpoint Detection and Response?
EDR is a security protocol that was developed for one main reason; visibility. Visibility is the important criterion essential to block cyber threats infecting your devices. Before EDR, it was difficult to detect cyber-attacks if the alert bell was dysfunctional. In case an attack occurred at your endpoint, it takes nearly 6 months to detect them and stop them. This situation is known as an advanced persistent threat (APT). This is one of the complex threats that can take up your network and stay undetected for a long period.
EDR can detect APT threats. They continuously monitor the IT systems along with automated data analysis so that they can instantly spot unusual activities occurring at your endpoint. Using EDR you will be well aware of the endpoint’s behaviour.
Elements of EDR
The elements of EDR support them to create visibility and help them to identify the security breaches happening in the endpoints.
Data collection and storage
Data collection: EDR constantly monitors the endpoints and collect the data of every happening in real time without disturbing the system performance. The data contains the daily activities of your endpoint, system processes, network connections acquired and data transfer details. They analyse the daily data and in case of any unexpected behaviour they will alert you.
Data storage: The data collected from the endpoint is stored in this data storage. Most of the organizations store these data in the cloud. If it is cloud based storage, it organizes the data so that you can easily sort them out. Cloud system helps to combine the data with threat intelligence and finds out infectious files from them.
Analytics and forensic capabilities
In order to detect potential attacks, EDR should analyse multiple endpoint data. This can only be done with the help of real time analytics. These threat hunters are known as security operations centre (SOC).
Automated analytics: If you have control over the data, you can do the initial analysis manually. But when the volume of data is high, these data are transferred to the machine learning engines to combine with network activity and detect the threats using artificial intelligence. They work on the basis of two patterns, namely indicators of compromise (IOCs) and indicators of attack (IOSs)
Forensic analysis: This feature cross checks human validated data to detect the presence of any infection. This is because false positive can occur from humans and to mitigate this forensic analysis is done.
Fast response
If any threat is identified, EDR takes quick action. These quick responses help to keep your endpoint security and prevent damages to stolen financial or customer data. The response by EDR includes automated alerts and automated logging-outs. If any suspicious activities are found, they immediately shut down the network access and leave the endpoint to be isolated.
EDR works through a different processes including detection, triage, investigation and remedy execution. These processes ensure that your endpoint remains safe and intact. First, to detect your threats you need to install a software agent on your endpoints which helps in data collection. This software regularly analyses the endpoints, collects data and sends them directly to the machine learning algorithms to scan them for abnormalities. Infected files get blocked and suspicious files get flagged.
EDR has the capability to detect millions of threats without narrowing down the system performance. Also if any suspicious activities are detected, they send alerts to the employees and the IT staff. The employees manually check each of them and remove the false positives.
Endpoints should always be protected as endpoint cyber-attacks are increasing at a higher rate. EDR has the power and capability to safeguard your endpoints from all the upcoming threats.
