Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) practices and solutions enable organizations to gain visibility into endpoint threats. By implementing EDR, you can achieve continuous visibility, dynamic threat protection, fast incident response, and forensics analysis. However, a poorly configured EDR pipeline might create new vulnerabilities in your security perimeter. This article explains basic EDR concepts and reviews common EDR pitfalls you should avoid at all costs.
What Is EDR?
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a combination of processes and tools that you can use to protect your network perimeter and endpoint devices. EDR enables you to monitor endpoints, identify suspicious activity, and respond to threats automatically according to set policies. The purpose of EDR solutions is to increase the visibility of your endpoint devices and to enable faster and more efficient responses.
Why Do You Need EDR?
Endpoints are any externally facing gateway in your network. Endpoints are needed for users to communicate remotely with a network. These gateways are also exploited by attackers to enter a network. To keep your systems and data safe, you need to protect your endpoints. EDR can provide this protection in the ways covered below.
Continuous visibility
Lack of visibility can lead to teams overlooking attacks and makes a comprehensive response more difficult. EDR solutions enable continuous monitoring and visibility across your network perimeter. These solutions enable teams to monitor all endpoints from a single location and can provide reporting for better threat analysis and regulatory compliance.
Dynamic threat protection
Traditional endpoint solutions are signature-based, relying on malware hashes and other known indicators of attack. Unfortunately, many attackers are finding ways around these tools, using methods that operate in system memory and leave little evidence of activity.
EDR uses event correlation and behavioral analyses to detect such attacks. EDR tools go beyond the capabilities of traditional tools and can help you dynamically identify threats that have not yet been identified by intelligence communities.
Faster incident response
EDR solutions can speed incident response in multiple ways. Better detection strategies lead to issues being identified more quickly. Built-in alert capabilities and a centralized dashboard help ensure that security teams are alerted as soon as an incident is detected.
From the dashboard, the incident context is immediately available and actionable. Finally, most EDR solutions include automated response functionalities, enabling you to isolate and block threats in real-time, even after hours.
Forensics support
Many EDR solutions support forensic analyses of threats with correlated contextual information and visualization of attack chains. Continuous monitoring and logging enable teams to easily and reliably access attack data and trace any root vulnerabilities. Behavioral analyses can also help teams identify the intent of attackers, helping security teams intercept an attack.
EDR: Common Mistakes to Avoid
While EDR solutions can significantly improve your network security, these tools are not perfect. To work properly and effectively, it is up to you to configure and maintain these solutions. Below are a few common mistakes that teams face when implementing EDR.
Underestimating the time and resources required
EDR solutions collect data from your entire perimeter. In a small system, this may be manageable but in medium to enterprise-sized systems, EDR generates a huge amount of data. This data includes application activity, data transfers, OS events, network connections, and user activity.
Even with the automated response and alert prioritization, sifting through this data requires significant security team resources. Additionally, this team must devote a substantial amount of time to monitoring and managing your solution. Assuming that EDR is a set and forget sort of tool is a huge mistake.
To ensure that your team is prepared and has the resources needed to manage your EDR solution, consider the following:
- Does your security team understand the time required to triage and investigate threats?
- What is the average volume of alerts that will be generated in a given period?
- If you do not have the resources to dedicate, would you be better protected with a managed EDR solution?
Over-emphasizing prevention
Many EDR solutions are beginning to include prevention measures as a capability. This is often accomplished by combining EDR with endpoint protection platforms (EPPs). EPPs are designed to focus on prevention, with firewalls, encryption, and integration with next-generation antivirus. However, the integration of these tools isn’t yet perfected, and trying to combine the two may mean sacrificing the performance of both.
While prevention is vital, you are currently better off implementing two separate products that can be integrated after adoption. If the solution you choose includes preventative functionality, make sure you understand its limitations. You need to know whether preventative features are meant to replace your existing solutions or are only meant to increase prevention.
Not outlining triage and response procedures
For EDR solutions to be effective, your security team needs to clearly understand how to act on the alerts and data provided. Trusting an EDR solution to manage all threats on its own is a huge mistake.
You need to ensure that there is clearly outlined process for your team to follow when an alert occurs or a response is needed. This process standardizes security actions and can reduce the chance that incidents are overlooked. Clear procedures can also ensure that responses completely eradicate threats.
Once your procedures are in place, you should make sure to periodically audit your processes. EDR features may change with updates or configurations may differ as new endpoints are added. Periodically auditing procedures help ensure that your team is responding to alerts in a way that is appropriate for your current capabilities and system structures.
What to Look for in an EDR Solution
When you’re ready to choose an EDR solution, there are a few considerations to keep in mind. Understanding and evaluating how the limitations of an EDR solution can effect you are key. Here are a few of the primary functionalities you should look for:
- Integration—solutions should integrate smoothly with your existing tooling and environments. Make sure to account for any planned changes, such as cloud migration or intents to scale up network size.
- Support included—solutions can vary widely in terms of how much expertise is needed to configure and maintain EDR. If you have in-house security experts you can likely adopt a more advanced solution comfortably. If not, you may need a managed solution.
- Level of visibility—make sure you understand the level of visibility a solution can provide. This includes what type of events are recorded, what sources data can be ingested from, and how solutions respond to connections/disconnections of endpoints.
- Compatibility—a solution needs to be fully compatible with all of your environments, devices, and infrastructures.
Conclusion
Today’s computing landscape is cluttered by distributed and highly connected and complex networks. Further aggravating this complex mix are connectivity technologies like edge computing, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. All of these connections eventually end up as endpoints on your networks, turning your security perimeter into a dynamic matrix. EDR tools and practices can help ensure continuous visibility into these complex environments.
However, you should take care when implementing EDR. If you underestimate required resources, you might end up with overhead. If you over-emphasize prevention, you could end up with configuration issues. And if you forget to create simple procedures, you risk missing threat alerts. You can avoid these mistakes by implementing practices that ensure the process is constantly monitored and all relevant parties are well versed in their respective roles and responsibilities.