Deploying NDR To Transform Threat Detection

Protecting the network is a complex challenge for cybersecurity teams. Enterprises across all industries are facing more sophisticated attacks, with threat actors increasingly taking advantage of blind spots and network vulnerabilities.

During the third quarter of 2022, there were an estimated 15 million data breaches worldwide, with threat actors relentlessly adapting and evolving their tactics to avoid detection. Organizations must gain greater visibility into network communications to adequately protect their data.

Overcoming modern risks requires incident responses that go further than just raising alerts. To focus on uninterrupted business growth, organizations need to strengthen the capabilities of their security tools. They need an intelligent machine learning (ML) driven solution that can identify suspicious behavior, monitor the network in real time, and easily integrate with existing security systems.

Navigating A Complex Threat Environment

Over the past year, security teams have had to protect their networks from threats coming from all angles. The transforming nature of threats, the rise of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, and the expanding digital attack surface is putting critical data at more risk than ever before. 

To add to this challenge, the growing cybersecurity skills gap is creating further pressures on security teams. A lack of security professionals is causing organizations to experience internal security challenges such as misconfigured systems, delayed system patches, and lack of threat awareness.

The combination of these circumstances has given threat actors a golden opportunity to target organization’s digital assets. Security teams need to arm themselves with a powerful network solution to protect their IT environment and bolster their cybersecurity strategies.

Transforming Network Security With NDR

According to 360 Market Updates, the global Network Detection and Response (NDR) market size is expected to reach $4670 million by 2027. NDR delivers high-level protection capabilities, building a full picture of network activity. It is a progressive security solution for obtaining full visibility to both known and unknown threats that cross the network. 

With NDR, organizations gain a centralized, machine-based analysis of network traffic, and response solutions, including efficient workflows and automation. It provides valuable capabilities to enable security teams to achieve the following: 

1.    Prevent Attacks:    NDR leverages ML-powered intelligence to proactively identify cyberattacks. It gathers irrefutable network-based evidence for threat analysis, policy enforcement, audit support, and legal action. 

NDR makes threat hunting easier by giving security teams the ability to identify suspicious activity quickly and easily. Organizations gain the tools to understand their threat environment, helping them to quickly eliminate risks such as lateral movement, exfiltration, malware compromise, and ransomware. 

2.    Detect Suspicious Activity:    NDR identifies indicators of attack or compromise. The blended approach of using both scenario analytics and ML effectively detects more attack indicators while also reducing false positives.

ML-based detections use both supervised and unsupervised ML techniques to create a holistic and accurate real-time behavior model of end-to-end enterprise activity at the
network, host, user, and process level.  

3.    Respond to Risks with an Integrated Approach:   To achieve an even more comprehensive threat detection and response experience, NDR can be easily integrated with market-leading firewalls and extended detection and response (EDR) solutions. 

This adds network visibility to organization’s existing threat detection to extend coverage across endpoints, data centers, and the cloud.

4.    Contain Threats:   When network-borne threats strike, time is of the essence. By deploying NDR’s built-in rules, organizations can take control of their security posture with a hybrid solution to understand the extent to which adversaries are moving across their environment laterally.

NDR is capable of surfacing threats that evade detection by traditional tools. It is intuitive, so organizations don’t need sophisticated network forensics expertise to capture threats. As a result, organizations can rapidly mitigate risks, limit the amount of damage to the network and focus on delivering digital transformation without disruption.

Fighting Back Against Network Threats

Defending the network is a continuous task for SOC teams, however deploying automated and intuitive security capabilities can ease the burden.

With NDR, organizations gain greater visibility to defend against network-borne attacks. Effectively mitigating network threats requires intelligent data insights to understand what risks your organization is up against. Centralized, machine-based analysis of network traffic can help you gain visibility into these threats, making threat detection and mitigation a streamlined process.

Kev Eley is Vice President Sales UK and Europe at LogRhythm

You Might Also Read:

Building a Threat-Ready Ransomware Response Plan: