Threat Detection and Response (TDR) is essential to business security, reducing data breaches and costly downtime while strengthening enterprises' overall security posture.
Early identification of threats reduces intruder dwell time, helps minimize damages, and allows teams to work effectively together.
TDR solutions deliver top-of-the-line alerts that eliminate false positives, helping cybersecurity teams stay focused. When combined with managed detection and response service providers, these tools fill any EDR blind spots.
Identification and response to cyber threats is an integral component of business operations. With cyberattacks becoming ever more sophisticated, businesses need the tools to detect them quickly before they cause irreparable damage. Threat detection and response is a multifaceted process involving people, processes, and technology.
Step one in creating a robust threat detection program is to establish roles and responsibilities for handling alerts. This involves outlining exactly which actions each team member should take when responding to alerts and who they should contact when necessary (whether other departments, third-party partners, or law enforcement). Furthermore, creating a crisis communications plan provides another means of keeping your organization informed in case an incident arises.
An effective TDR solution should go beyond internal processes by including various technologies to detect potential attacks. These may include security information and event management (SIEM) solutions to aggregate log data for analysis; endpoint detection and response tools offering detection, analysis, and investigation capabilities; and threat intelligence integrations that help identify new attack vectors.
Many businesses opt for managed detection and response (MDR) services, which offer a third-party team of cybersecurity experts to monitor and protect their networks. This approach reduces time and resource waste as programs run more smoothly while saving resources on hiring additional professionals. A good MDR provider should offer extensive tools and flexible plans that meet your business's requirements.
Types of Threat Detection
Though most security tools protect against known threats like ransomware, malware, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, attackers constantly look for ways to bypass these defenses. That is why threat detection systems were created - to detect and thwart these attempts by attackers and newer cyber threats like previously unseen malware or advanced persistent threats (APT).
TDR solutions employ various approaches to detect these evasive threats. Sandboxing enables analysts to review suspicious files in virtual environments; threat hunting tracks activity across daily activity in search of any signs that threats have emerged, and behavioral analytics detect patterns or anomalies which might indicate attacks are underway.
TDR solutions use these detection methods to continuously scan and identify all cybersecurity risks, from known and unknown threats such as phishing to new malware or APTs, helping organizations reduce the impact of cyber attacks on their infrastructure, data, and business operations.
To effectively detect and prevent all risks, a TDR solution must combine all threat detection methods to minimize mean time to detect and respond times for all threats, providing complete visibility into all cyber attack surfaces and activities both on-premises and in the cloud. It should also provide rapid detection, investigation, and containment capabilities to minimize damage and loss caused by breaches in the early stages.
Essential Components of a TDR Solution
TDR solutions are software tools designed to detect threats in real time, notify security teams when they occur, and prevent attackers from accessing systems or data. Threat detection protects various business assets against cyberattacks, including networks, applications, databases, email, and Internet of Things devices, from cybercriminals and ransomware attacks that traditional anti-virus and firewall solutions cannot stop.
TDR solutions utilize signatures and behavioral analysis to rapidly scan massive activity logs for abnormal behavior or hidden threats that might cause harm, helping organizations reduce attacker dwell times while speeding up incident response processes.
Today's IT infrastructure is intricate, connecting computers, mobile devices, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices via networks. For effective threat detection to occur in this environment, complete visibility must be available across the board - which is why many TDR solutions offer integrated threat intelligence and alert correlation features.
The best TDR solutions provide an all-encompassing platform to safeguard against advanced threats that exploit connections among various components of an IT infrastructure. They can effectively block malware, exploits, and advanced ransomware across cloud, on-premises, or data center environments by employing AI-powered antivirus. In addition, these solutions can quickly remediate compromised hosts using forensic analytics that detect indicators of compromise and pinpoint their sources.
What Does Threat Detection Do?
Threat detection works to detect early signs of attacks and allows security teams to respond before an actual breach takes place. It involves monitoring for malicious activity, recognizing vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them, and employing people, processes, and technology to recognize signs of breaches quickly and act accordingly.
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) offers an effective threat detection solution by employing advanced analytics to rapidly analyze log data from endpoints and networks and compare them against real-time updates of known bad actors - this enables quick identification of unusual or suspicious activity while decreasing time spent investigating false positive alerts. SEM automatically gathers, organizes, normalizes, and compares raw log data collected across network endpoints against its regularly updated threat intelligence feed to reduce manual effort while increasing accuracy in threat detection.
The best threat detection tools provide effective protection from everyday cyber threats such as ransomware, malware, DDoS attacks, and phishing attacks; but also serve to detect more invasive forms of attacks like fileless attacks, zero-day attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APT), long-term campaigns where attackers establish presence in networks to insert malware or collect credentials before exfiltrating data without being detected - such attacks often motivated by hacktivism, cyber espionage or financial gain and can include state-sponsored attackers; however, a TDR solution offers effective defense mechanisms against such forms of attacks.
Benefits of Threat Detection
Detection is the key to protecting businesses from cyberattacks that threaten business operations, compromise data assets and lead to financial losses. Threat detection and response solutions help organizations protect sensitive information while avoiding downtime costs and meeting security mandates.
Threat detection solutions allow security teams to prioritize threats and quickly respond to attacks as they occur. Furthermore, such solutions can assist them in preventing future attacks by identifying vulnerabilities exploited by attackers to gain entry into their systems.
An effective threat detection solution should be able to recognize common cyber threats such as ransomware, malware, DDoS attacks, and phishing attacks, as well as more sophisticated ones like APTs and zero-day attacks.
Zero-day threats exploit software vulnerabilities not yet identified or disclosed to its vendors/developers and do not match any known malware signatures. An APT attack involves long-term surveillance to gain intelligence for intelligence gathering to steal data or target systems.
Recognizing and responding to these threats can be challenging due to their ability to bypass traditional anti-malware defenses such as firewalls and intrusion prevention systems. They may also exploit weaknesses within applications or devices on your network that leave it open to attack.
An effective TDR solution should have a low false positive rate, reducing unnecessary alerts that waste security team time. Furthermore, it must recognize the individual conditions of your network environment to generate alerts that are pertinent only to it.
Threat Detection and Response Best Practices
An effective threat detection program involves investing in appropriate technologies, trained personnel, and documented processes that are regularly reviewed to stay abreast of emerging threats. While such investments require time and resources, the return can be significant: protecting businesses against cyberattacks while decreasing data breaches with their associated damage is the ultimate payback.
To reduce data breach risks, an effective approach is to create an incident response plan outlining procedures for recognizing, investigating, and responding to security incidents. This should include setting clear roles and responsibilities while documenting how cross-functional or third-party stakeholders should be brought in to ensure responses run efficiently and smoothly.
Investment in tools that detect all areas of attack surface is also integral to effective threat detection, including network and endpoint threat detection technologies that analyze traffic patterns across an environment, including from the internet, looking out for malicious behavior. User behavior analytics tools may also prove helpful as they establish baselines for "normal" behaviors before using analytics and machine learning (if available) to detect anomalous activities that might indicate unknown threats.
An effective threat detection program must also include penetration testing. This can help identify weaknesses in existing defenses and provide insight into what kinds of attacks your organization is subjected to.
