Highlights:
- Early endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions often make incident response and remediation even harder.
- Advanced ransomware can weaken an organization in a few seconds by speedily locating and infecting vital servers and other components.
Endpoint security is a leading challenge for CISOs, who growingly view endpoint compromise as inevitable. Despite widespread belief in organizational readiness, ransomware attacks are constantly expanding in a sophisticated manner.
The worst thing is that traditional antivirus solutions and first-generation EDR tools are no longer adequate to tackle evolving threats. These solutions are frequently hampered by the following:
- Slow response times
- Platform limitations
- Alert overload
- Manual remediation demands
This indirectly leaves enterprises burdened and vulnerable.
Also, to efficiently save against modern threats, CISOs need to upgrade themselves from obsolete endpoint security solutions to advanced services that allow integration, superior speed, automation, and threat correlation.
Endpoint Security Consolidation for Enhanced Security
Considering the unavoidability of security breaches and the criticality of rapid threat detection, chief information security officers started deploying EDR systems to boost endpoint security years ago.
These early EDR solutions tracked endpoint activity for skeptical behaviors that could signal a compromise, such as process tampering or security interference.
While useful for incident response, these first-generation systems were majorly manual and isolated from the extensive IT and security infrastructure.
Underlying Expenses of Outdated Endpoint Detection and Response Solutions
Prior to the rise of extended detection and response (XDR), EDR solutions concentrated on tracking endpoint activity to highlight and respond to potential threats.
While these initial EDR tools improved threat visibility, they also came up with hidden concerns that were not apparent at first look.
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Inadequate response times
Despite investments in newer technologies, one would expect the verification and containment of breaches to be significantly faster. In the context of cyberattacks primarily aimed at data theft, the challenge of response time can be somewhat manageable with first-generation EDR solutions.
These attacks typically move stealthily to gather data, map the network, and locate valuable assets—a technique that can take weeks. To tackle such threats and prevent data theft, many CISOs consider a detection and response time of 24 hours or even a few days to be enough.
On the other hand, attacks like ransomware aim for sabotage rather than stealing data. These attacks are executed within minutes or even seconds, drastically decreasing the available response time.
Advanced ransomware strains are built to locate targets within an organization quickly and spread laterally to other parts of the enterprises, like servers and other networks, all within seconds. For example, NotPetya was a cyber weapon disguised as ransomware designed to cause destruction.
The attack occurred so speedily that no security team using first-generation EDR solutions could manually respond and contain it in time. Anything short of real-time blocking significantly increases the risk of an organization falling victim to a successful attack.
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Production downtime
First-generation EDR solutions frequently exacerbate the concerns of incident response and remediation. Separating a compromised endpoint to prevent further damage inevitably disrupts operations.
Manual threat verification, remote troubleshooting limitations, and reliance on time-consuming procedures like reimaging all add to extended downtime.
These disruptions are specifically detrimental in production environments where even brief interruptions can result in significant financial losses.
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False positives
EDR systems often create a high volume of alerts, many of which are false positives. Manually verifying these alerts is time-taking and resource-intensive. It diverts security teams from critical tasks and hampers overall security posture.
As the threat landscape extends, the manual triage of false positives becomes unsustainable, especially given the lack of cybersecurity talent.
This extensive volume of alerts can also result in analyst burnout and raise the risk of missing genuine threats.
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Shortage of skilled professionals
The lack of cybersecurity talent majorly hinders efficient incident response. With a rising number of unfilled cybersecurity positions, organizations face a critical dilemma.
Rapidly filling vacancies is vital to bolster endpoint security and tackle staff burnout, but hiring inexperienced employees can raise the risk of errors and misconfigurations.
Last Lines
Legacy endpoint protection solutions majorly depend on prevention or allow detection capabilities without real-time response. It is actually unable to tackle advanced threats.
The threat landscape is becoming challenging to handle. The intelligence and agility of cyberattacks bypass conventional endpoint management solutions, indirectly making them ineffective.
Filling security gaps is also becoming troublesome as security leaders face issues in identifying, recruiting, hiring, and retaining experienced and skilled security professionals. The proliferation of continuous threat alerts and false positives burdens current security teams. As a result, the teams become paralyzed and unable to sift through the vast amount of threat intelligence.
In such alarming situations, solutions like EDR, and specifically XDR, turn out to be a saving grace. It offers security incident detection and automated response capabilities that not only improve security infrastructure but also the complete security posture.
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