The Reveal Platform
With the rise of sophisticated attacks, a widening attack surface, more assets to protect, and limited security staff, threat detection and response is much more challenging today than in past years. Traditional tools, including Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Network Detection and Response (NDR), and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), aren’t sufficient to address these new challenges. In addition to being hamstrung by limited technology, security teams are under-resourced due to budget constraints.
To address these challenges, enterprises are turning to Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions. XDR is a vendor-specific, threat detection and incident response tool that unifies and contextualizes information from multiple security products into a security operations system.
In this white paper, we will take a closer look at XDR and help you understand what XDR is and how XDR can help you improve your threat detection and response programs. We’ll also introduce you to Gurucul Open XDR, a vendor-agnostic XDR solution, and help you understand the advantages it has compared to vendor-specific XDR products.
Modern cyberattacks have become much more sophisticated, often moving laterally through the network seeking high-value assets and data. Modern threat actors are also more difficult to detect, especially when they impersonate legitimate users. They operate slowly, being careful not to trigger alerts as they explore the environment. Threat detection and response activities are also more challenging with a widening attack surface brought about as more organizations move to the cloud, build more applications, adopt new endpoint devices including IoT, and embrace remote work.
Traditional tools, including EDR, NDR, and SIEM, aren’t designed for these modern threats and cloud environments. They provide limited and fragmented visibility into an organization’s security situation. These point solutions provide point in time snapshots rather than detect and analyze every step of an attack. They are ineffective for security teams that need to continuously analyze events across the entire security stack and kill chain. More importantly, these tools lack the necessary context to detect and effectively respond to sophisticated attacks.
One of the biggest challenges today with threat detection and response is the lack of context. Data captured from point security solutions is difficult for security teams to correlate to attacks. And the information provided isn’t in a format that’s useful to analysts. Correlating security information captured through a fragmented approach often lacks important data and provides a limited view of an actual threat. As a result, security teams that are already stretched thin find themselves having to manage too many alerts and lack sufficient context to respond quickly and efficiently.
Identity context is often overlooked when it comes to detecting threat actors or insider threats. Organizations need to examine both activity context as well as access context to root out malicious intent: who or what is on the network, what they are doing, what they have access to, and what they are doing with that access.
With more data generated as organizations move to the cloud and adopt more applications and instrument their endpoints, security teams cannot sift through the volume of information. Security Operation Centers (SOCs) are overwhelmed by the enormous volume of alerts generated by point security solutions, including EDR, NDR, application and platform event logs, DLP, malware detection, vulnerability data, threat intelligence feeds, HR user profiles, and access entitlements. Building and maintaining security data lakes are expensive, hard to scale, and often impact performance – resulting in lower productivity and a poor user experience.
XDR is a vendor-specific, threat detection and incident response tool that unifies and contextualizes information from multiple security products into a single security operations system. Primary XDR functions include the collection, centralization, and normalization of data in a repository for analysis and query. XDR solutions can detect today’s modern threats, including those that move slowly through an organization.
XDR goes beyond traditional reactive point solutions, including EDR, SIEM, and Network Traffic Analysis (NTA). XDR platforms integrate, analyze, and contextualize results from existing security control components giving you a unified view of your organization’s security posture across the entire environment. XDR solutions can detect an entire kill chain.
XDR platforms integrate into Incident Response (IR) or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solutions, saving security teams from integrating each security tool separately.
Most XDR solutions are vendor-specific. While vendor specific solutions can simplify deployment by integrating their common security control components, the single vendor approach can add time and expense if customers have to replace competing control products first. Also, they’re limited to the vendor’s technology stack and expertise.
The most common form of insider threat is nauthorized disclosure of sensitive information. This type of incident occurs when an individual with authorized access to confidential data — e.g., customer data, trade secrets, personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), financial information, etc. — shares it with unauthorized individuals or entities
“XDR creates a unique attack story with advanced analytics and machine learning techniques that combine data from endpoints, networks, cloud resources, email systems, and other relevant sources.”
– Vijay Kanade,
AI Researcher
Gurucul Open XDR is a vendor-agnostic XDR solution. It unifies control points, security telemetry, analytics, and operations into one enterprise system allowing the security operations team to detect and respond to threats faster and more effectively. As a vendor-agnostic solution, customers can leverage their best-of-breed security control products while deriving the benefits of a unified threat detection and response system. Gurucul has over 350+ out-of-the-box integrations with the most popular security and identity products in use today. New connectors can quickly and easily be built using the Gurucul flex connector framework.
Gurucul Open XDR offers several advantages:
Gurucul Open XDR’s cloud-native platform is highly scalable and optimized for fast and efficient threat detection and response. Core capabilities include:
Gurucul Open XDR’s intelligent telemetry-based analytics applies advanced analytics to detect, predict, investigate, hunt, and remediate threats before they can damage an organization’s ecosystems. It reduces noise and false positives, delivering extensive context that enables the security operations team to focus on the activities that present the highest risks. Unified telemetry data is transformed into risk-prioritized alerts, allowing security teams to detect and respond to threats faster and more efficiently.
The analytics engine uses machine learning (ML) rather than static rules, which allows the system to perform endpoint anomaly detection without having to anticipate and define parameters in advance. Gurucul’s machine learning engine includes more than 4000+ data models out-of-the-box. These models are available on day one to deliver immediate impact. The models are tuned to run on high-frequency network data streams to detect real-time anomalies and risk-rank the threats. Customers have the flexibility to fine-tune existing models and create their own.
Gurucul’s analytics unifies data received from distributed networks, cloud environments, SaaS applications, identity stores, and various endpoints. It combines their behavior with user and entity behavior to deliver rich context for further analysis or remediation.
Gurucul Open XDR enables security teams to quickly discover:
Gurucul ingests huge volumes of data generated by user activity from disparate, even obscure and unstructured sets of data. Advanced AI/ML backed algorithms are then applied simultaneously to hundreds of thousands of discrete events from multiple data sets to identify relationships that span time, place, and actions. Gurucul’s artificial intelligence features link and analyze these relationships to derive “meaning” from behaviors and provide early warning detection, prediction, and prevention. This helps in solving the challenges customers have faced using legacy tools where context is siloed. There’s no linkage between user identities, their accounts, access, and activities. And there’s no linkage across applications behavior patterns over time.
Gurucul Open XDR offers the industry’s first rollout of model chaining to automatically link and visualize the sequence of threats in one screen without manual process or lookups. This technique identifies and creates a dynamic threat chain of anomalies stitching together different stages of attack, with all the necessary metadata and risk associated at each step. It also provides the additional information such as playbook recommendations, total entities affected, log sources involved, users impacted, dwell time of the incident, etc. As a part of the workflow, it also allows automated mitigation using built-in playbooks which can also be triggered manually. Bidirectional integration with external systems captures the mitigation status and audit information providing a centralized dashboard to track and report the current state of incident response to SOC Managers and executives.
The Gurucul Security Data Lake provides customers with one centralized data store to collect all the data generated by multiple feeds, rather than collecting and storing multiple copies of the same data in different places. Data is compressed and stored in a Distributed File System so that it can be retained for years. This is a tremendous benefit when performing post breach analysis by training algorithms to classify bad actors. And as new models to combat threats are developed, a wider range of training data than the traditional 30-day or 60-day training data used in many platforms is required. The Gurucul Security Data Lake can retain your data without any limitations on volume, and makes it easy to access the data for training or threat hunting purposes. Retaining the data is not only valuable for analytics, but also for regulatory compliance and auditing purposes.
The Gurucul Security Data Lake is provided at no cost for use with Gurucul Open XDR. The platform itself offers open choice of big data, so if your organization already has a data lake, Gurucul can leverage your existing investment.
Gurucul Open XDR ingests vast amounts of information from Gurucul’s Security Data Lake and then leverages machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and open analytics to connect the dots to provide visibility into unknown and previously undetected threats. By leveraging big data and machine learning, Gurucul Open XDR allows organizations to identify what “normal” behavior looks like, making it easy to spot suspicious and anomalous activities.
The solution is incredibly powerful for identifying previously unknown malware, zero-day exploits, and attacks that are slow to develop. It can also identify rogue behavior by insiders (or attackers using legitimate insider’s credentials). For example, Gurucul’s XDR can detect endpoint malware that is missed by software dependent on signatures and known patterns, based entirely on the malware’s behaviors.
Gurucul Open XDR provides a solid foundation with one of the largest libraries of machine learning models available, including 4,000+ pre-packaged ML models pre-tuned to detect and predict threats for specific use cases and verticals. Security teams can utilize these prepackaged rules to detect signatures of existing cyber threats, or write their own rules tailored for their specific environment.
Gurucul provides access to all of your data in real-time. Detecting advanced threats requires modern analytics tools that leverage historical data to analyze events and tie behavior as one of the key components. Gurucul supports analyzing large volumes of heterogeneous data by linking various data points together and supports running complex ML backed algorithms to detect sophisticated patterns used by advanced threats. Legacy SIEMs are rules driven and analyze data based on short term storage and miss the context by providing alerts that lack information for additional investigation.
Transform unified telemetry data into risk prioritized alerts. With risk-prioritized, contextual alerts that detect threats as they occur, Gurucul Open XDR can automatically mitigate the most serious security threats in your environment before cyberattacks or insider threats can inflict damage. The machine learning models are pre-tuned to predict and detect threats aligned with specific use cases data telemetry, industry verticals, and threat and compliance frameworks (MITRE, PCI-DSS etc.).
Traditional threat detection and response systems can overwhelm SOC teams with a flood of alerts triggered by their rule and signature-based systems. This causes operator fatigue and increases the likelihood of missing something important. In comparison, Gurucul Open XDR can automatically correlate a series of low-confidence events to deliver risk prioritized alerts based on contextual behavior with much higher confidence. It eliminates noise and allows SOC members to prioritize and focus on what’s important, responding to the threats that represent the greatest risk to their organization.
The solution utilizes AI-enabled automated response modules that run on Gurucul’s Security Data Lake. SOC analysts can dive straight into investigations and remediation without having to access multiple sources of information to tie a security narrative together. Gurucul Open XDR automatically creates these narratives.
Gurucul Open XDR automates responses, reducing the Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and mitigate risk. Case management lets analysts see all the threats for an entity or a user under one umbrella, which makes the investigation faster and further reduces the MTTR.
Leveraging detailed correlation and contextual data, security teams can rapidly contain threats across multiple layers. Security staff can leverage automated response actions with risk-based triggers, orchestration playbooks, and automated incident timelines that create smart links of the entire attack lifecycle for pre- and post-incident analysis.
Security operations analysts can visualize the entire kill chain and effectively trace the origin of the attack and reconstruct the steps with intelligent risk prioritized telemetry data.
Gurucul Open XDR also helps speed up investigations using big data to mine linked events, users, accounts, entitlements, structured and unstructured data, along with risk score and peer group analytics. The platform unifies telemetry logs and provides contextual searches using big data to enhance root-cause analysis after-the fact reducing investigation time.
Automated Incident Timelines create a smart link of the entire attack lifecycle for pre and post incident analysis. Timelines can span days and even years of data in easy to understand visualizations. Visualization and Dashboarding enable analysts to view threats from different perspectives using several widgets including Tree Map, Bubble Chart, etc., that provide full drill down capabilities into events without leaving the interface. The unique scorecard widget generates a spider chart representation of cyber threat hunting outcomes such as impact, sustaining mitigation measures, process improvements score, etc.
Gurucul Open XDR is ideal for the following use cases:
Gurucul Open XDR can be considered a primary and powerful tool for aggregating data across all instrumented endpoints. Customers can get immediate value starting day one with Gurucul’s out-of-the-box one click integration with widely used security applications. Gurucul collects data from a broader cross-section of security components, including endpoints, networks, servers, cloud platforms, applications, IoT, SIEM, identity sources, and more. Ingested data from each of your systems is passed through a series of processing to optimize the information for different use cases, including threat hunting, triage, and investigation. Gurucul unifies your disparate data logs and links them together with corresponding identity information.
Following the unification of data from various sources, Gurucul’s advanced analytics and ML techniques create a contextual link and establish a baseline from past behaviors for each entity in the organization. Gurucul identifies high-risk endpoints, entities, and their profiles, with risk-based analytics, data mining, anomaly, and behavior detection. This enables analysts to easily predict
and detect abnormal endpoint and entity behaviors associated with potential sabotage, data theft, or misuse. Built-in SOAR capabilities close the loop, enabling security teams to take immediate action based on preconfigured playbooks and workflows.
Traditional threat hunting tools are only efficient when they have known indicators of compromise (IoC). Unfortunately, these tools can’t effectively handle unknown threats. In contrast, Gurucul Open XDR’s intelligent threat hunting module automatically correlates events across multiple data sources. It is the only solution that creates a smart timeline providing details for every phase of an attack from initiation to breach.
Gurucul Open XDR helps threat hunters to:
With more employees working from home or other remote locations, threat detection and response can be challenging. Gurucul Open XDR reduces security risks introduced by remote work, allowing security teams to:
Gurucul offers Managed XDR to help organizations:
“XDR integrates a range of investigative tools, behavioral analytics and automated remediation capabilities – which have traditionally been point security products – into a single platform with a strong focus on advanced threat detection and tailored responses.”
– TechTarget Article,
“SIEM vs. SOAR vs. XDR: Evaluate the differences”
Gurucul Open XDR, already deployed in large enterprise organizations, significantly enhances the productivity of security operations teams and reduces cybersecurity risk. Customers cite the following benefits as critical reasons for their continued investment in Gurucul:
With the growth of modern attacks, a widening attack surface, and leaner security teams, companies should consider XDR to address these challenges. Gurucul Open XDR, a vendor-agnostic solution, allows companies to respond faster to threats with intelligent, telemetry-based analytics powered by ML and AI, and improve security operations productivity without vendor lock-in.
