Rajat Mohanty, the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Paladion discusses the advantages of early detection and response for cyber security breaches
By the time data breaches have run their course, it is often too late. The resulting loss of revenue, reputation, and customer confidence can be irreparable. Managed Detection and Response service can help in early detection and faster response to contain breaches and limit damages.
At Paladion, we’ve seen our clients benefit from the following six enhancements as part of the MDR service.
Early Detection of Threats
By discovering threats and vulnerabilities faster, security breaches are contained in early stages of kill chain.
1. Avoid the attacks that have hit other enterprises and organizations. Every day, we see news about a specific security threat that has already claimed multiple victims. When their initial attack has succeeded, attackers typically repeat it against other targets across industries and geographies. Failure to learn about and act on these incidents can leave you vulnerable. Yet do you really have the time to keep track of all security attacks and attackers globally, learn from them, and apply those lessons in your own network in the form of detection rules or response methods? The right MDR service can do all of that for you. At Paladion, our MDR service scans evolving threats as they happen and wherever they happen, picks out the most relevant threats to your IT systems, and details the specific actions for your environment. This tailored threat anticipation goes far beyond traditional passive threat intelligence feeds available elsewhere in the industry.
2. Detect hidden or unknown threats that were missed in basic monitoring. Traditional security monitoring is rule based, but attackers today can bypass those rules by using new techniques. Security analytics and machine learning are the new methods to detect these advanced attacks. With an MDR service, you can benefit from enhanced security without the complexity of deploying your own big data analytical platform or hiring data scientists. Paladion’s threat hunting service for your cyber detects unusual machine behavior, malicious processes and files, insider threats and abnormal user behavior, suspicious data exfiltration, and unusual application transactions, to alert you to possible attacks as soon as they start.
Rapid Assessment of Attacks for Better Responses
If a security breach is in progress, you need to know immediately the extent and the severity, to take appropriate action.
3. Monitor attack campaigns instead of chasing individual alerts. Traditional MSS (managed security services) only provide visibility of point-in-time threats. You receive notifications as these threat events occur in your systems and network, but this may result in chasing many irrelevant alerts. Sophisticated attacks today often happen over longer periods using multiple stages of a cyber kill chain. These campaigns can therefore go undetected in the deluge of daily alerts you receive. Our MDR service uncovers connections between alerts over the longer term using analytics to detect campaigns and reveal entire cyber kill chains. You can then mitigate relevant threats with visibility of the entire attack.
4. Quickly investigate the impact of the threats. Traditional security monitoring systems send you alerts based only on rules and signatures. You must then investigate them to determine their relevance and the threat it poses to your environment. This not only eats up your time, but can be a very slow process to assess the overall impact. Today’s fast paced attacks can cause significant damage in the time it takes for investigation. At Paladion, we have designed a system that speeds up investigation on high severity threats, so that you can know rapidly whether they are relevant and how much damage they have caused. Action can then be immediately taken before the breach progresses.
Containment of Breaches and Prevention
Rapid action helps limit attack impact, while proactive management ensures your organization will no longer be vulnerable to the same attack in the future.
5. Contain incidents at machine speed. If a breach in progress is discovered, urgent actions required may include changing configurations in firewalls or routers to block access, removing user accounts, killing a process or deleting files, or applying virtual patches via intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and web application firewalls (WAF). Paladion’s CyberActive MDR service automates these activities through an orchestration platform for immediate containment of breaches.
6. Eradicate root causes beyond any immediate threat. Apart from immediate containment, an effective incident management process involves 3 other critical steps: remediation; recovery; and lessons learnt. We create clear playbooks for these steps for the different incidents affecting your organization. These playbooks can be executed through collaborative workflows in our MDR service platform involving your team and our expert responders.
MDR, the Extra and Essential Layer of Security
Traditional managed security services (MSS) provide you base security in the form of log collection, log monitoring, scanning and device management. MDR services builds on that base to detect and respond to threats swiftly to prevent breaches that MSS may have missed. Together, MDR and MSS can provide a solid defense against conventional and advanced threats and attacks.
