The Role of NDR in Your Security Strategy

Traditionally, security operations centers (SOCs) have relied on endpoint detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) tools to prevent cyberattacks. While EDR and SIEM products have improved threat detection for many organizations, these solutions can be difficult to deploy, operate and manage, and they often lack key features and capabilities that organizations need to detect and stop threats earlier in the attack cycle to minimize business impact.

For example, to gain broad endpoint visibility, organizations need to deploy agents on all of their endpoints–a potentially costly and time-consuming proposition, especially for large enterprises, that can degrade the performance of those endpoints. The need to deploy so many agents on so many endpoints complicates maintenance of the EDR solution.

Additionally, savvy attackers can shut down or remove agents. Meanwhile, SIEM products–due to their reliance on log data–tend to generate a lot of false positives that distract security analysts and lead to alert fatigue. Logs also contain limited information, which leads to limited context and insight, and logs can also be destroyed or modified by attackers.

The challenges associated with EDR and SIEM have prompted forward-leaning security teams to implement network detection and response (NDR) solutions. These organizations have come to understand that the network, not logs or endpoints, is the highest-fidelity data source for early threat detection. The network, afterall, is where adversaries first land, where they expand their reach, establish command and control (C2) communications, move laterally, and employ stealthy “living off the land” techniques to evade detection by traditional endpoint security solutions. The network also can’t be compromised by attackers the way endpoint agents and logs can. And that’s why early adopters have been drawn to NDR: because it provides security teams with complete visibility inside the network—into north-south and eastwest traffic—something SIEM and EDR solutions simply aren’t built to do. And through that visibility, security teams can catch the anomalous network behaviors that often signal an early stage attack…