What is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

As cyberattacks grow in volume and sophistication, even businesses with the strongest defences are at risk of being breached. Organisations need to not only try to prevent attacks, but they need to know how to respond. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services help your business to be more responsive by combining advanced monitoring with proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.

WHAT IS MDR? HOW DOES IT WORK?

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a sophisticated cyber security service designed to enhance an organisation's security posture by combining advanced technology with expert human analysis. The process begins with continuous remote monitoring of the organisation's network. This is typically achieved through Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools, which provide extensive visibility into network activities.

EDR tools continuously scan and record endpoint activities, generating alerts for suspicious behaviour. These alerts are analysed by cyber security experts and/or human analysts, who use their insights to evaluate the severity and nature of the threats and determine the appropriate response.

The response phase involves automated and manual interventions to isolate and neutralise threats. Advanced algorithms in EDR tools automate immediate responses to known threats, while analysts handle complex or novel threats. Post-threat, MDR services focus on system recovery, restoration of the affected endpoint to its previous state, and fortification against future attacks. This ultimately enhances an organisation's resilience to evolving cyber threats.

WHAT CAN MDR DO FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

As cloud adoption expands the attack surface and cyber criminals become increasingly sophisticated, it’s extremely challenging to find the necessary resources to protect your businesses. To be able to respond quickly to known and unknown advanced threats, you need complete visibility and coverage. Fortunately, MDR is able to offer some formidable business solutions:

• Automating Manual Processes - the more data you collect, the better coverage you have of your threat surface. The problem, however, is that the data needs to be analysed and contextualised. Human expertise is vital but, when done manually, it can take a huge amount of time and leave unidentified threats within your environment. MDR delivers automated detection and response capabilities to reduce the volume of manual work while ensuring attack signatures, indicators of compromise and malicious IPs are all accounted for.
• Reducing False Positives - due to the rapid evolution of the techniques, tactics and procedures used by cybercriminals, IT teams can receive an incredible volume of security alerts and false positives. Effective MDR solutions use Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning models to deliver high-fidelity detection and more accurate investigations.
• Augmenting Cyber Security Resources - few organisations have access to their own security operations centre (SOC), despite its key role in building cyber security maturity. With MDR, you can outsource your SOC capabilities and gain access to a team of security experts and professionals who can help reduce risk without removing focus from your core business activities.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF MDR?

With MDR, your business can rapidly identify threats and reduce their impact without the need for additional staff. In fact, Managed Detection and Response services offer your business many benefits, including:

• Rapid and Robust Response - MDR can disrupt, isolate, and stop even the most advanced threats and ensure your business is never disrupted. With the right MDR provider, you can have confidence that cyber threats are being responded to on your behalf, even before you’re aware they're happening.
• Full Attack Surface Visibility - with MDR's multi-signal cyber threat intelligence, you can gain full threat visibility with a complete picture of the entire attack surface. The increased visibility enables deeper data correlation and threat investigation.
• Round-the-Clock Threat Hunting - instead of having to staff a team of threat hunters, you have access to a highly skilled team of security experts who rapidly investigate, contain and close down threats 24/7 when an automated response isn’t possible.
• Advanced Threat Detection - with MDR, you can gain access to world-class threat researchers who hunt the most advanced undetected threats and stay ahead of cybercriminals.

QUESTIONS TO ASK A POTENTIAL MDR PROVIDER

Not all MDR services are created equal, which means it's vital to fully vet any potential provider before working with them. Some providers can overload you with alerts, provide limited visibility and leave you to contain threats independently. What you want is an MDR provider that will not just alert you to threats but provide multi-signal visibility, threat containment and complete response capabilities on your behalf. While every MDR provider will claim to offer an effective solution, it’s not always evident if they go beyond offering alerts. To help you ensure you find an effective provider that can deliver robust protection for your organisation, it’s vital to ask questions such as:

• How will they identify risk, improve resiliency and optimise MDR?
• How will they alleviate complexity and resource constraints?
• How will they integrate with existing and future environments?
• How will they minimise dwell time and support incident response?
• How will they detect and automatically block the latest security threats?

Whilst these questions don’t cover every component required for an effective MDR vendor, they are a good starting point for finding a vendor to meet your specific requirements.

STRENGTHEN YOUR SECURITY POSTURE WITH MDR

With MDR, you can strengthen your security posture by quickly stopping threats before they impact your business.

If you’d like to learn more about MDR and see an MDR demonstration in action, contact the cyber security experts at InfoTrust today for a consultation.

‍