All posts by Margaret Wei

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: H2 2025 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/pt-whats-new-rapid7-products-services-h2-2025-review-mdr-siem-eap

Over the last six months we’ve delivered significant advancements across the Command Platform, as well as received recognition as a Leader in Exposure Management and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) analyst reports. From launching new AI-driven capabilities – including our new next-gen SIEM Incident Command – to introducing real-time visibility into organizational risk with enhanced dashboarding, we continued to innovate in ways that support faster, more confident decision making. Explore the highlights of what we’ve been up to below.

Exposure Management: Prioritize risk across your attack surface

Rapid7 named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms

Rapid7 was recognized as a Leader in the inaugural 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP). We believe this reflects our ability to help customers continuously understand, prioritize, and reduce risk across their hybrid environments. Exposure Command brings unified visibility, attacker-aware prioritization, and guided remediation together in one platform, enabling teams to make faster, more confident decisions with validated, business-aligned risk insights. Check out our recent blog post to learn more.

Remediate vulnerabilities faster with AI-generated Risk Intelligence

Prioritizing remediation is difficult when teams are flooded with CVEs and lack actionable context about real-world risk. We introduced AI-generated risk intelligence within Remediation Hub to help teams focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most and drive faster, more consistent risk reduction by distilling exploitability, business impact, toxic combinations, and patchability into clear summaries and guided actions. Check out our recent blog post to learn more.

⠀

Rapid7-AI-Generated-Remediation-Summary-Remediation-Hub.png
AI-generated Remediation Summary in Remediation Hub

Gain real-time visibility and communicate progress with the Exposure Management Dashboard

To effectively plan, track, and communicate exposure reduction, teams need a clear, real-time view of their security posture. The new Exposure Management Dashboard provides this view with an at-a-glance snapshot of asset coverage, exposure trends, and remediation progress — ideal for quarterly planning cycles and board-level reporting. Exportable views make it easy to justify investment decisions, demonstrate measurable improvements, and show how tool consolidation is strengthening your security program. Learn more in our recent blog.

⠀

Rapid7-Exposure-Management-Dashboard.png
Exposure Management Dashboard, built to give you a real-time view of organizational risk

Validate real cloud exposures with Public Exposure Validation

When cloud configurations drift or controls degrade, it’s critical to know which assets are actually exposed to the public internet. Public Exposure Validation confirms externally reachable cloud resources using real external scans, reducing noise and eliminating theoretical findings.

Teams gain clearer visibility into true attack paths, shorten investigation cycles, and validate that remediation efforts are closing real gaps. This strengthens their posture with evidence, not assumptions. Learn more in our recent blog.

Keep external visibility accurate with Dynamic EASM Discovery

Accurate external discovery depends on seeds that reflect what’s truly exposed. But static seed lists can quickly become outdated. Dynamic EASM Discovery continuously pulls domains and public IP ranges from authoritative sources such as MarkMonitor, NetBox, and Rapid7 AppSec, ensuring your discovery scope stays current without manual upkeep.

This eliminates blind spots, keeps external inventories aligned with real-world change, and strengthens CTEM outcomes by grounding scope, discovery, and prioritization in real-time data rather than spreadsheets. See our recent blog on Dynamic EASM Discovery to learn more.

Detection and Response: Transform your SOC operations

Rapid7 named a Leader in the 2025 Frost Radar™ for Managed Detection and Response

In addition to being named a Leader in Exposure Assessment, we’re proud to share that we have also received this recognition for Managed Detection and Response with Frost & Sullivan recognizing Rapid7 as a Leader in the 2025 Frost Radar™ for MDR, based on innovation and growth in a field of 120 evaluated vendors. The report highlights:

  • Rapid7’s AI-driven triage accuracy of 99.93%, which helps security teams close benign alerts and reclaim 200+ SOC hours per week

  • Our unified platform combining MDR with exposure management, threat hunting, and active remediation

  • 180+ third-party integrations across endpoint, network, cloud, and identity

This recognition reinforces Rapid7’s commitment to proactive, outcome-driven security and delivering continuous innovation, transparent AI, and measurable value to customers. Learn more.

IDC publishes its Business Value of Rapid7 MDR Study

IDC recently published its Business Value of Rapid7 MDR study, highlighting how customers can achieve a 422% three-year ROI, a 5-month payback period, and an impressive range of additional security outcomes delivered through Rapid7 Managed Detection and Response. The study found that Rapid7 MDR significantly reduced the chances of major security incidents and improved the speed to identify threats for customers – translating to both risk reduction and cost savings. Learn more about the study in our blog or download the full report.

New third party event sources available for Rapid7 SOC management

For organizations to stay secure, they need visibility across their entire attack surface. With recent third party event source expansions, our Rapid7 SOC can now manage PAN Cortex XDR, Okta Identity, and Google Security Command Center alerts as a part of our MDR and Managed Threat Complete offerings. This reinforces our defense-in-depth approach, in which Rapid7 collects, correlates, and maps native and third party telemetry to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, providing expanded visibility and greater protection across your entire attack surface. Learn more about SOC-supported third-party event sources here.

Introducing Incident Command

In July we announced our new AI-powered, next-gen SIEM, Incident Command. Designed to transform how security teams manage investigations and response, Incident Command automates manual tasks and guides analysts through complex workflows — accelerating triage, providing real-time recommended actions, and unifying critical context across alerts and incidents. 

Backed with generative AI, our next-gen SIEM helps teams reduce mean time to respond (MTTR), improve consistency, and scale security operations without adding headcount. Learn more about what Incident Command can do for your team here.

⠀

Rapid7-Incident-Command-Home-Page.png
The Incident Command Home Page brings critical SOC analyst tools together into a singular, actionable view

Rapid7 recognized for the 7th consecutive year in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM

Rapid7 has been recognized in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), proof of our continued focus on helping security teams work smarter, respond faster, and stay ahead of evolving threats. This year’s report explores how SIEMs are transforming to meet the demands of modern, hybrid environments with greater automation, stronger analytics, and improved efficiency across security operations. We believe our inclusion underscores our commitment to delivering speed, transparency, and extensibility with our next-gen SIEM. Read the report for more insights.

InsightGovCloud: Trusted security for federal agencies

Rapid7 achieves FedRAMP authorization for InsightGovCloud platform

Our achievement of FedRAMP Authorization to Operate (ATO) underscores our commitment to delivering secure, trusted cloud security solutions for federal agencies. The InsightGovCloud Platform provides government customers with vetted capabilities for vulnerability management, cloud security posture, and threat detection, meeting the rigorous standards required to protect sensitive federal environments, while enabling faster, more efficient security operations. Learn more.

Rapid7 Labs: Uplevel your defenses with our latest cybersecurity intelligence and research findings

New research: Q3 2025 Threat Landscape Report

Our Threat Landscape Report provides an analysis of global adversary behavior drawn from Rapid7’s MDR operations, vulnerability intelligence, and threat research. Our latest Q3 2025 report outlines key trends that are shaping today’s threat environment – including AI-assisted attacks and the rapid operationalization of new vulnerabilities – offering clear guidance to help security teams anticipate emerging risks and strengthen defenses in an increasingly fast-evolving landscape. Read the report here.

Emergent threat response: Real-time guidance for critical threats

Rapid7’s Emergent Threat Response (ETR) program from Rapid7 Labs delivers fast, expert analysis and first-rate security content for the highest-priority security threats. In H2 2025, Rapid7’s ETR team provided expert analysis, content, and mitigation guidance for a variety of notable vulnerabilities, including:

Follow along here to see the latest emergent threat guidance from our team.

Technical assessments of CVEs in AttackerKB

Rapid7 researchers also publish additional vulnerability assessments in AttackerKB to help customers and the community understand and prioritize notable CVEs. Notable contributions from the back-half of 2025 include: 

Stay tuned for more!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2025 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/04/01/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-q1-2025-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2025 in Review

At Rapid7, we started off the year focused on delivering new features and advancements across our products and services to bring you the context needed to prioritize exposures, visualize your attack surface, and accelerate incident response. Read on for Q1 2025 release highlights across the Command Platform, from Exposure Command to Managed Threat Complete.

Eliminate blind spots with Exposure Management

Discover and protect sensitive data across hybrid environments

Keeping sensitive data secure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments isn’t easy—especially without clear visibility. Data gets misplaced, duplicated, or left exposed, making risk assessment and compliance difficult. Sensitive Data Discovery, our latest feature delivering clarity and control to your security data, can help.

Available as part of  Exposure Command and InsightCloudSec, Sensitive Data Discovery gives security teams real-time visibility into sensitive data, such as PII, financial data or customer records, across multi-cloud environments, helping identify exposures, prioritize risks, and take action faster.

With automated scanning and classification, you can pinpoint who has access to sensitive data, continuously monitor for exposures, and strengthen compliance while streamlining incident response. Learn more Sensitive Data Discovery  here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2025 in Review
Sensitive Data Discovery in InsightCloudSec

Intelligent vulnerability prioritization with AI-driven CVSS Scoring

In February 2024, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) stopped providing CVSS scores for all CVEs, creating a gap in risk assessment as vulnerabilities go unscored. To bridge this gap, we’ve introduced AI-Generated Risk Scoring in Exposure Command, which uses machine learning to supplement missing CVSS scores and ensure an immediate, accurate risk rating for all CVEs without manual analysis.

This AI/ML scoring ensures all vulnerabilities are properly assessed, helping you prioritize remediation efforts efficiently and strengthen your overall security posture with the right context and insights. Discover more about AI-driven CVSS Scoring here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2025 in Review
CVSS Risk Scoring in InsightVM

Prioritize risk and accelerate remediation of critical exposures

To effectively prioritize remediation efforts and reduce cyber risk, you need clear contextual information about your assets and vulnerabilities. Without this, you risk misclassifying the severity of vulnerabilities and wasting effort on low-priority issues while high-risk threats remain unaddressed.

Our newly expanded Surface Command and Remediation Hub integration embeds this necessary context about assets and vulnerabilities directly within the asset inventory and detail pages of Surface Command, providing:

  • Faster mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) by bringing prioritized remediation guidance directly to the pages your team is already working within in Surface Command.
  • Deeper asset context at the time of remediation, including insights from third-party security and ITOps tooling.
  • Improved collaboration by providing security teams and stakeholders with enriched context for quicker decision-making.

Learn more about how this integration can empower your team to act with confidence, ensuring that remediation efforts are focused on the vulnerabilities that matter most here.

MDR: A clear line of sight

New detection and response dashboard

Teams need a holistic view of threats, SOC activity, and response performance to have confidence in their program and communicate efficacy to leadership and stakeholders. Available for Managed Detection and Response customers, our new customizable Detection & Response Dashboard provides an executive-ready snapshot of your MDR program, offering real-time, easy-to-communicate insights into:

  • Threat prioritization & alert trends: Analyze the volume of alerts by severity and identify the most common alert types to understand the highest-risk threats.
  • Incident response efficiency: Threat pipeline visualization tracks how alerts progress to investigations and incidents, while mean time to begin investigating highlights response speed.
  • Investigation & resolution metrics: Insights into closed alerts and investigations by priority and disposition help teams assess the effectiveness of their threat response and remediation efforts​.
What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2025 in Review
Detection and Response Dashboard in Rapid7 MDR

Learn more about the dashboard in our blog.

Transparency in AI-driven security: AI Alert Triage decisioning

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed security operations, enabling faster detection and response. However, black-box AI decision-making can lead to uncertainty—why was an alert escalated or dismissed?

With Rapid7’s AI Alert Triage Transparency, MDR customers gain full visibility into the reasoning behind AI-driven security actions​, such as what factors influenced alert prioritization. You’ll also benefit from Rapid7’s AI triage’s 99.89% accuracy, reducing noise and giving you more time to focus on investigating real threats. Learn more about what this means for your organization here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2025 in Review
AI-Powered Auto Triage in Rapid7 MDR

The latest intelligence from Rapid7 Labs

Emergent threat response: Real-time guidance for critical threats

Rapid7’s Emergent Threat Response (ETR) program from Rapid7 Labs delivers fast, expert analysis and first-rate security content for the highest-priority security threats to help both Rapid7 customers and the greater security community understand their exposure and act quickly to defend their networks against rising threats.

In Q1 2025, Rapid7’s ETR team provided expert analysis, InsightVM content, and mitigation guidance for a variety of notable vulnerabilities, including several that came under active attack. Q1 CVEs of note include:

Follow along here to see the latest emergent threat guidance from our team.

Technical assessments of CVEs in AttackerKB

This past quarter Rapid7 researchers also published additional vulnerability assessments in AttackerKB (Rapid7’s community platform for vulnerability research and threat data) to help customers and the community understand and prioritize notable CVEs:

Coordinated vulnerability disclosure

In February 2025, Rapid7 researchers discovered a novel vulnerability in PostgreSQL (now assigned CVE-2025-1094) while researching BeyondTrust CVE-2024-12356, which was exploited as a zero-day flaw in a high-profile attack on the U.S. Treasury Department.

In every scenario Rapid7 researchers tested, a successful exploit for BeyondTrust CVE-2024-12356 had to include exploitation of PostgreSQL CVE-2025-1094 in order to achieve remote code execution. See Rapid7’s full analysis of CVE-2024-12356 here and our disclosure of PostgreSQL CVE-2025-1094 here.

Stay tuned for more!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/12/18/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-q4-2024-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review

This quarter at Rapid7 we continued to make investments across our Command Platform to provide security professionals with a holistic, actionable view of their entire attack surface – from Exposure Management to Detection and Response. Below, we’ve highlighted key releases and updates from the quarter across our products and services, including the new Platform Home Navigation experience, extensibility enhancements to Exposure Command and Surface Command, expanded MXDR support, and 2024 threat landscape trends from Rapid7 Labs.

Accelerate security efficiency and results with Rapid7’s Command Platform

In October, we released our revamped, modernized Command Platform home navigation experience for all users, providing a more cohesive, efficient flow for our users and increased visibility between Rapid7 products and capabilities. Now, viewing security program metrics across your suite of Rapid7 products is easier than ever before—so you can spend less time navigating between products and more time making decisions with easily accessible data.

We’ll be building on this new experience in the coming year to bring iterative updates to the look, feel, and function of the Command Platform—stay tuned for more!

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review
New Command Platform Home Navigation

Along with the navigation updates, we’ve made improvements to our user management experience. Now, teams are empowered to better safeguard data and systems with more tailored, role- and responsibility-based user access controls. This enables easier collaboration across your organization while ensuring the appropriate access level for each person.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review
Revamped user management experience

Achieve complete attack surface visibility and proactively eliminate exposures from endpoint to cloud

Rapid7 co-launches Resource Control Policies with AWS, Adding Support in Exposure Command and InsightCloudSec

Leading up to Re:Invent, AWS announced a powerful new feature to help organizations enforce least privilege access at scale: Resource Control Policies (RCPs). RCPs are an org-level access control policy that can be used to centrally implement and enforce preventative controls across all AWS resources in your environment.

To support this launch, we expanded our existing cloud identity and entitlement management capabilities to include dedicated, out-of-the-box checks for consistent and secure application of RCPs. Today, both Exposure Command and InsightCloudSec include these checks, enabling organizations to apply RCPs consistently and securely. Learn more here.

Shifting Left to Stay Secure with Exposure Command

Developers are at the forefront of modern cloud environments, making “shift-left” strategies essential for effective security. By addressing risks during development rather than after deployment, teams can eliminate vulnerabilities before they become costly issues.

To support our customers in executing stronger shift-left strategies, Exposure Command now offers more robust Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanning and deeper CI/CD integration with Terraform and CloudFormation support across hundreds of resource types. For development teams, integrations like GitLab, GitHub Actions, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure DevOps bring security checks directly into their workflows, helping to secure code without disrupting productivity.

Streamline Vulnerability Management Across Your Entire Application Inventory with Vulnerability Groupings

Triaging scan results can be one of the most arduous and time-consuming parts of vulnerability management, but it’s also one of the most critical. Teams need to quickly synthesize results to validate exposures, prioritize response, and determine next steps for safeguarding their attack surface.

With the recent addition of Application Vulnerability Grouping, InsightAppSec customers can now visualize attacks and assess single applications or their entire application inventory at once, allowing teams to:

  • Visualize exposures with pre-triaged vulnerabilities by app and attack type
  • Identify and focus on threats in key functional areas to simplify vulnerability remediation
  • Manage application-layer risks at scale by updating the status or severity and adding comments to entire groups of vulnerabilities at once
What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review

Explore Exposure Management Use Cases via Guided Product Tours

We’re excited to introduce a new way for you to engage hands-on with core use cases across the Command Platform with our new guided product tours. These tours provide a first-hand, in-depth look at new products and features.

Today, you’ll see tours showcasing how Surface Command can help you map your entire attack surface and identify coverage gaps across your security ecosystem. You’ll also learn how you can prioritize remediation efforts and mobilize teams across your organization with Remediation Hub. Check out the available tours here, and we’ll continue to add more covering use cases across the Command Platform in the future.

Gain Insights from Products Across Your Environment Faster with Self-Service Surface Command Connector

Surface Command customers can now install connectors at their own convenience via the Rapid7 Extensions Library, making it faster and easier to gain visibility into cyber asset insights across your security and IT management tools. Customers can choose from over 100 out-of-the-box connectors to ingest and enrich asset data within Surface Command, consolidating insights from across your entire security ecosystem into one place.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review
Surface Command connectors in Rapid7 Extensions Library

Pinpoint critical signals and act confidently against threats with cloud-ready detection and response

A Growing Ecosystem of Cloud Event Sources in InsightIDR and MDR

At Rapid7, we understand that organizations are tasked with collecting and correlating vast amounts of data across their unique ecosystems. To tackle this, teams need faster, more dynamic mechanisms to ingest cloud data directly into their SIEM tool. We addressed this earlier this year with cloud event sources, providing a native cloud collection framework that can receive log data from cloud platforms directly – without requiring installation of collector software in their cloud and on-premise environments.

This quarter, we further expanded our list of cloud event sources by adding support for Microsoft products, including: Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud, Defender for Identity, Defender for Cloud Apps, Defender O365, Defender for Vulnerability Management, and Entra ID.

MXDR: Expanded Support for Microsoft & AWS

In our Q3 “What’s New” blog, we announced the launch of Rapid7 MDR for the Extended Ecosystem (MXDR), which expands our MDR service to triage, investigate, and respond to alerts from third-party tools within customer organizations. Now, we’re excited to announce that we have updated our MXDR to support an expanded subset of detections across AWS GuardDuty and Microsoft security tools, bringing more protection to customer environments across a broader group of security tools.

Furthering our commitment to keep organizations safe and ahead of adversaries in today’s complex threat landscape, this update includes:

  • Deepened existing support for Microsoft security tools like Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud, and AWS GuardDuty
  • Expanded support (via aforementioned cloud event sources) to critical alerts across Defender for Identity, Microsoft O365, Defender for Vulnerability Management, and Microsoft Entra
What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review
Example Microsoft Defender for Endpoint alert

Expanded Coverage for Next-Gen Antivirus: MacOS and Linux

We’ve extended operating system coverage for Next-Gen AV (NGAV) support beyond Windows OS to now include protection capabilities for MacOS and Linux. Now, customers utilizing NGAV don’t have to utilize multiple point systems across the operating systems within their detection surface to stop breaches as early as possible in the kill chain.

The latest research and intelligence from Rapid7 Labs

2024 Threat Landscape Statistics

This year, Rapid7’s global Managed Services team and Rapid7 Labs researchers responded to hundreds of major incidents, significant vulnerabilities, and ransomware threats—delivering emergent threat guidance, research reports, and other vulnerability and threat content for customers. See the roundup of key statistics and trends from our Rapid7 Labs team in our recent blog post, here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q4 2024 in Review
Example of findings presented in the 2024 Threat Landscape Statistics: Ransomware Activity, Vulnerability Exploits, and Attack Trends from Rapid7 Labs

Emergent Threat Response: Real-time Guidance for Critical Threats

Rapid7’s Emergent Threat Response (ETR) program from Rapid7 Labs delivers fast, expert analysis and first-rate security content for the highest-priority security threats to help both Rapid7 customers and the greater security community understand their exposure and act quickly to defend their networks against rising threats.

In Q4, Rapid7’s ETR team provided expert analysis, InsightIDR and InsightVM content, and mitigation guidance for multiple critical, actively exploited vulnerabilities and widespread attacks, including:

Follow along here to receive the latest emergent threat guidance from our team.

Stay tuned for more!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q3 2024 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/10/01/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-q3-2024-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q3 2024 in Review

This was one of the most exciting quarters at Rapid7 as we announced the next chapter in our mission to give customers command of their attack surface: the Rapid7 Command Platform, our unified threat exposure and detection and response platform. With this, we introduced two exciting new products:

  • Surface Command: Unifies asset inventory and attack surface management
  • Exposure Command: Brings together the comprehensive visibility of Surface Command with hybrid vulnerability management for true end-to-end risk management

While building on our legacy as a pioneer in vulnerability management, we’ve also made expansions on the detection and response side of the house – expanding our Managed Detection and Response capabilities with the release of MDR for the Extended Ecosystem. Read on for more details on these exciting launches across Rapid7 products and services.

Achieve complete attack surface visibility and proactively eliminate exposures from endpoint to cloud

As digital infrastructure continues to evolve from traditional on-prem models to hybrid, distributed teams and systems, one thing remains the same – the attack surface continues to grow, creating more risk and a wider visibility gap.

With the August launches of both Surface Command and Exposure Command, Rapid7 is closing the visibility gap and providing your team with the tools to visualize, prioritize, and remediate risk from endpoint to cloud.

Surface Command: Comprehensive visibility you can trust

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q3 2024 in Review

Surface Command provides the foundational attack surface visibility that underpins the Command Platform by breaking down security data silos and combining comprehensive external attack surface monitoring with internal asset visibility across hybrid environments. The result? A dynamic 360-degree view of your entire attack surface in one place. With this view, you can:

  • Visualize your entire digital estate from endpoint to cloud
  • Prioritize and mitigate exposures and potential threats with a risk-aware and adversary-driven view of your entire attack surface
  • Identify and address misconfigurations, shadow IT, and compliance issues

Learn more about Surface Command.

Exposure Command: Pinpoint and extinguish critical risks from endpoint to cloud

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q3 2024 in Review

Exposure Command extends the power of Surface Command by combining complete attack surface visibility with high-fidelity risk context and insight into your organization’s security posture. Exposure Command aggregates findings from both Rapid7’s native exposure detection capabilities as well as third-party exposure and enrichment sources you’ve already got in place, so you are able to:

  • Extend risk coverage to cloud environments with real-time agentless assessment
  • Zero-in on exposures and vulnerabilities with the threat-aware risk context
  • Continuously assess your attack surface, validate exposures, and receive actionable remediation guidance
  • Efficiently operationalize your exposure management program and automate enforcement of security and compliance policies with native, no-code automation

Learn more about Exposure Command.

Continuous red teaming at your (managed) service with Vector Command

Attackers are relentlessly looking for weak spots and new access points into your organization – you should be too. Leverage Vector Command – our latest continuous red teaming service – to proactively test your external attack surface with ongoing red team exercises and expert guidance from Rapid7’s team of managed services experts.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q3 2024 in Review

With Vector Command, your team will experience:

  • Increased visibility of the external attack surface with persistent, proactive reconnaissance of both known and unknown internet-facing assets
  • Improved prioritization with ongoing, expert-led red team operations to continuously validate your most critical external exposures
  • Same-day reporting of successful exploits with expert-vetted attack paths for multi-vector attack chains and a curated list of “attractive assets” that are likely to be exploited
  • Monthly expert consultation to confidently drive remediation efforts and resiliency planning

Learn more about Vector Command.

Improved scale, reliability and contextualized reporting for cloud and on-prem vulnerability management

The increased scale, rate of change, and complexity associated with cloud and on-prem environments makes managing vulnerabilities a challenge. This quarter we continued to advance our agentless vulnerability assessment capabilities to drive improved scalability and extended reporting to allow teams to quickly identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities at scale. This includes:

  • In-cloud assessment for Azure hosts drive improved cost efficiency for running vulnerability assessments at scale across all cloud hosts running on Microsoft Azure.
  • Unified cloud vulnerability reporting combines context and insights across discovered CVEs, software and resources with proof data included by default to enable more effective and accelerated vulnerability remediation.
  • Increased granularity for cloud vulnerability first found dates enables teams to quickly understand where an organization is exposed to a given CVE both at an organizational level across their environment globally or on a per-resource basis.Accurately report on MTTR with first found date enhancement for on-prem vulnerabilities with the addition of “First Found” and “Reintroduced” columns, providing deeper visibility into when a vulnerability was first discovered and if it was later reintroduced after patching.

Comprehensive content coverage for policies and critical systems

We strive to provide you with fast and broad coverage for critical policies and systems so you can accurately assess the environment for vulnerability and compliance risks. This past quarter we added a number of new policy coverages and enhancements to InsightVM and Nexpose, including:

  • Arista EOS coverage: Arista is a popular alternative to Cisco, and this expansion provides you with broader coverage of your boundary devices and better insights into critical assets.
  • Released policy coverage for DISA STIG Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019; DISA STIG for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9; and CIS Benchmark for Fortinet Fortigate to ensure continued compliance.
  • Enhanced existing coverages for critical systems like Alpine Linux, Oracle Linux, Windows Server 2022, and Debian Linux.

Pinpoint critical signals and act confidently against threats with cloud-ready detection and response

Introducing MDR for the Extended Ecosystem

In an ever-expanding cybersecurity landscape, organizations are under more pressure than ever to keep pace with the widening attack surface. That’s why we’re so excited to bring extended support and coverage capabilities to our MDR customers with the launch of Rapid7 MDR for the Extended Ecosystem. With this addition, we’re extending our service to include triage, investigation, and response to alerts from third-party tools already in use within customer organizations.

This initial release will bring support for major EPPs such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, and SentinelOne, with plans to extend coverage to more third-party tools across cloud, identity, and network in the coming months.

Read this recent blog entry to learn how this extension of MDR sets Rapid7 apart and brings your team coverage, protection, and peace of mind.

Rapid7 named a Leader in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SIEM for SMB and Enterprise

We’re excited to share we’ve been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SIEM for SMB 2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US52038824, September 2024) and the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SIEM for Enterprise 2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US51541324, September 2024). We’re proud that IDC highlights InsightIDR’s superior threat detection content, ease of implementation, and tangible ROI – all areas where we continually invest to provide users with a streamlined, complex-free experience.

To our customers: Thank you. Your partnership, feedback, and trust fuels our dedication to delivering the detection and response functionalities you need to take command of your attack surface and keep your organization safe. Read more about the reports here.

Intuitive log search enhancements to empower practitioners of all levels

Collecting, analyzing, and correlating logs from various sources is table stakes in identifying potential threats, detecting malicious behaviors, and responding to incidents effectively. Within InsightIDR we continue to enhance our Log Search functionality to empower you to go beyond simply correlating logs so you can feel confident securing your organization and enhancing your security posture.

Reformatted Log Search not only optimizes view and streamlines accessibility, but it reduces friction with notable enhancements:

  • Pre-computed queries auto-run in less than half a second and can be leveraged from our OOTB library of queries or built custom using “groupby” or “calculate” commands.
  • Automatic key suggestions are provided to analysts during query building based on the log selection to ensure faster time to investigate (as opposed to recalling and populating individually).
  • Using the select clause, you can leverage new key suggestions to choose those to include in your search results. You can also customize their names and order.

The latest research and intelligence from Rapid7 Labs

Ransomware Radar Report: Findings and insights into the booming ransomware space

According to Rapid7 Labs Ransomware Radar Report, ransomware continues to evolve at a rapid pace. With the first half of 2024 seeing a +67% increase in the average number of ransomware groups actively posting to leak sites each month, it doesn’t appear that things are slowing down.
The report offers analysis and insights to help security practitioners understand and anticipate the latest developments around ransomware attacks. This research is based on data from Rapid7’s Incident Response and Rapid7 Labs teams as well as thousands of publicly reported ransomware incidents observed from January of 2023 through June of 2024.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q3 2024 in Review
Source: Rapid7’s Ransomware Radar Report

Read the Ransomware Radar Report now to learn the key takeaways for keeping your organization safe from ransomware.

Emergent Threat Response: Real-time guidance for critical threats

Rapid7’s Emergent Threat Response (ETR) program from Rapid7 Labs delivers fast, expert analysis and first-rate security content for the highest-priority security threats to help both Rapid7 customers and the greater security community understand their exposure and act quickly to defend their networks against rising threats.

In Q3, Rapid7’s Emergent Threat Response team provided expert analysis, InsightIDR and InsightVM content, and mitigation guidance for multiple critical, actively exploited vulnerabilities and widespread attacks:

Follow along here to receive the latest emergent threat guidance from our team.

Stay tuned for more!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q2 2024 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/07/11/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-q2-2024-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q2 2024 in Review

This quarter we continued to make investments that provide security professionals with a holistic, actionable view of their entire attack surface. In Q2, we focused on enhancing visualization, prioritization, and integration capabilities across our key products and services. Below we’ve highlighted key releases and updates from the quarter across Rapid7 products and services—including InsightCloudSec, InsightVM, InsightIDR, Managed Detection and Response, and Rapid7 Labs.

Rapid7 acquires Noble to deliver comprehensive visibility and command of your attack surface

Rapid7 has acquired Noble, a leading provider of continuous cyber asset inventory, visibility, and management. This acquisition further enhances our ability to provide customers with the necessary control to monitor and manage exposures across their entire attack surface – from endpoint to cloud – with confidence. Visit our announcement overview page to learn more and stay tuned for additional details coming this summer.

Anticipate imminent threats from endpoint to cloud

Uncover multiple paths to risky compromised resources across cloud environments

We continue to enhance Attack Path Analysis in InsightCloudSec, most recently adding a new visualization that shows all of the various paths to a potentially compromised resource, providing a better understanding of the potential blast radius of an attack. We’ve also added the ability to export Attack Path graphs as a PDF, JPG, PNG, or SVG for easy sharing with additional stakeholders.

Automatically prioritize the most at-risk resources based on Layered Context

Layered Context provides insight into the riskiest resources running across cloud environments by taking into account a variety of risk signals from vulnerabilities to identity-related risk and public accessibility. This context makes it easier for security teams to effectively and efficiently prioritize cloud risk remediation efforts.

We recently released the following updates to Layered context:

  • Automatic prioritization of riskiest resources by taking into account the presence of toxic combinations to assign a relative risk score to all cloud resources.
  • A new risk tab, located on the Resource Details panel, that details all the risks impacting a resource in one view, transparently and efficiently diagnosing what is risky and why.

Access agent-based policy assessment results with InsightVM’s Bulk Export API.

Agent-based policy assessment is used to conduct configuration assessments of IT assets against widely used industry benchmarks or custom internal policies. Now customers can use the new Bulk Export API to export the policy assessment results data to their business intelligence tools and build custom visualizations and workflows that meet their reporting needs. Additionally, this API allows for efficient request and download of large data sets directly from the Insight Platform, avoiding unnecessary load on the Security Console and giving greater flexibility in handling the high volume of data that policy assessments produce.

Insight Agent support for ARM-based Windows 11 devices in InsightVM

Take advantage of the ARM processor chip’s great performance and low power requirements while maintaining agent-based visibility and assessment of remote assets within InsightVM. We also released enhanced vulnerability coverage for Windows 11 to provide customers with even higher quality, accurate vulnerability content.

Pinpoint critical signals of an attack and act confidently against threats

Rapid7 AI Engine extended to include Generative AI, driving improved MDR efficiency

Enhancements to the Rapid7 AI Engine have brought new Generative AI capabilities to the Rapid7 SOC, improving the efficacy and efficiency of our MDR services. These new additions include:

  • The new SOC Assistant that guides our internal SOC and MDR analysts through complex investigations and streamlines response workflows by querying sources like the Rapid7 MDR Handbook, keeping our analysts a step ahead.
  • The ability to automatically generate incident reports once investigations are closed out, streamlining a typically manual and time-intensive process. Every report that is generated by the Rapid7 AI Engine is reviewed and enhanced as needed by our SOC teams, making certain every data point is accurate and actionable.

Stop attacks before they begin with Rapid7’s patented Ransomware Prevention

Rapid7’s patented, preemptive Ransomware Prevention technology focuses on disrupting the evasive behaviors that ransomware and other forms of malware leverage, preventing both known and unknown (zero-day) attacks before they start. Coexisting alongside NGAV, EDR, and EPP solutions, Ransomware Prevention:

  • Provides an additional layer of protection on the endpoint focused on mitigating the risk associated with ransomware by using proprietary Data Encryption detection and response technology.
  • Focuses on the inner techniques that malicious and evasive attacks employ and embed in processes (instead of passively looking for patterns and analyzing processes and behaviors on runtime or post-execution), manipulating their logic so that they refrain from execution.

Monitor Crowdstrike Falcon EDR alerts within InsightIDR for streamlined alert triage

Simplify operations and optimize resource allocation by further integrating third party endpoint detection and response solutions with Rapid7. Managed Detection and Response customers can integrate CrowdStrike Falcon Endpoint with InsightIDR and leverage Rapid7’s highly skilled and experienced MDR SOC to help triage incoming alerts.

A growing library of actionable detections in InsightIDR

In Q2 2024 we added over 750 new detection rules. See them in-product or visit the Detection Library for descriptions and recommendations.

New research from Rapid7 Labs: The 2024 Attack Intelligence Report

Since 2020, Rapid7 has tracked huge increases in zero-day exploits, ransomware attacks, mass compromise incidents, and evolutions in attacker behavior. In our 2024 Attack Intelligence Report, Rapid7 Labs analyzed 14 months of attacker behavior and marquee vulnerabilities and provides expert analysis and practical guidance for security professionals.

Dive into key findings—like how 36% of the widely exploited vulnerabilities Rapid7 tracked involved network edge technology—in the report here.

In May we partnered with AWS for our Take Command 2024 Cybersecurity Summit, where we took a deep dive into new attack intelligence technologies like AI that are disrupting the threat landscape, macro influences on SOC teams, MDR services to build cyber resilience, and more. The sessions deliver clear guidance to zero in on threats and proactively prevent breaches—check them out on demand here.

Stay tuned for more!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2024 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/04/04/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-q1-2024-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2024 in Review

We kicked off 2024 with a continued focus on bringing security professionals (which if you’re reading this blog, is likely you!) the tools and functionality needed to anticipate risks, pinpoint threats, and respond faster with confidence. Below we’ve highlighted some key releases and updates from this past quarter across Rapid7 products and services—including InsightCloudSec, InsightVM, InsightIDR, Rapid7 Labs, and our managed services.

Anticipate Imminent Threats Across Your Environment

Monitor, remediate, and takedown threats with Managed Digital Risk Protection (DRP)

Rapid7’s new Managed Digital Risk Protection (DRP) service provides expert monitoring and remediation of external threats across the clear, deep, and dark web to prevent attacks earlier.

Now available in our highest tier of Managed Threat Complete and as an add on for all other Managed D&R customers, Managed DRP extends your team with Rapid7 security experts to:

  • Identify the first signs of a cyber threat to prevent a breach
  • Rapidly remediate and takedown threats to minimize exposure
  • Protect against ransomware data leakage, phishing, credential leakage, data leakage, and provide dark web monitoring

Read more about the benefits of Managed DRP in our blog here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: Q1 2024 in Review

Ensure safe AI development in the cloud with Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices

We’ve recently expanded InsightCloudSec’s support for GenAI development and training services (including AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI Service and GCP Vertex) to provide more coverage so teams can effectively identify, assess, and quickly act to resolve risks related to AI/ML development.

This expanded generative AI coverage enriches our proprietary compliance pack, Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices, which continuously assesses your environment through event-driven harvesting to ensure your team is safely developing with AI in a manner that won’t leave you exposed to common risks like data leakage, model poisoning, and more.

As with all critical resources connected to your InsightCloudSec environment, these risks are enriched with Layered Context to automatically prioritize AI/ML risk based on exploitability and potential impact. They’re also continuously monitored for effective permissions and actual usage to rightsize permissions to ensure alignment with LPA. In addition to this extensive visibility, InsightCloudSec offers native automation to alert on and even remediate risk across your environment without the need for human intervention.

Stay ahead of emerging threats with insights and guidance from Rapid7 Labs

In the first quarter of this year, Rapid7 initiated the Emergent Threat Response (ETR) process for 12 different threats, including (but not limited to):

  • Zero-day exploitation of Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Pulse Secure gateways, the former of which has historically been targeted by both financially motivated and state-sponsored threat actors in addition to low-skilled attackers.
  • Critical CVEs affecting outdated versions of Atlassian Confluence and VMware vCenter Server, both widely deployed products in corporate environments that have been high-value targets for adversaries, including in large-scale ransomware campaigns.
  • High-risk authentication bypass and remote code execution vulnerabilities in ConnectWise ScreenConnect, widely used software with potential for large-scale ransomware attacks, providing coverage before CVE identifiers were assigned.
  • Two authentication bypass vulnerabilities in JetBrains TeamCity CI/CD server that were discovered by Rapid7’s research team.

Rapid7’s ETR program is a cross-team effort to deliver fast, expert analysis alongside first-rate security content for the highest-priority security threats to help you understand any potential exposure and act quickly to defend your network. Keep up with future ETRs on our blog here.

Pinpoint Critical and Actionable Insights to Effectively and Confidently Respond

Introducing the newest tier of Managed Threat Complete

Since we released Managed Threat Complete last year, organizations all over the globe have unified their vulnerability management programs with their threat detection and response programs. Now, teams have a unified view into the full kill chain and a tailored service to turbocharge their program, mitigate the most pressing risks and eliminate threats.

Managed Threat Complete Ultimate goes beyond our previously available Managed Threat Complete bundles to include:

  • Managed Digital Risk Protection for monitoring and remediation of threats across the clear, deep, and dark web
  • Managed Vulnerability Management for clarity guidance to remediate the highest priority risk
  • Velociraptor, Rapid7’s leading open-source DFIR framework, from monitoring and hunting to in-depth investigations into potential threats, access the tool that is leveraged by our Incident Response experts on behalf of our managed customers
  • Ransomware Prevention for recognizing threats and stopping attacks before they happen with multi-layered prevention (coming soon – stay tuned)

Get to the data you need faster with new Log Search and Investigation features in InsightIDR

Our latest enhancements to Log Search and Investigations will help drive efficiency for your team and give you time back in your day-to-day—and when you really need it in the heat of an incident. Faster search times, easier-to-write queries, and intuitive recommendations will help you find event trends within your data and save you time without sacrificing results.

  • Triage investigations faster with log data readily accessible from the investigations timeline – with a click of the new “view log entry” button you’ll instantly see the context and log data behind an associated alert.
  • Create precise queries quickly with new automatic suggestions – as you type in Log Search, the query bar will automatically suggest the elements of LEQL that you can use in your query to get to the data you need—like users, IP addresses, and processes—faster.
  • Save time sifting through search results with new LEQL ‘select’ clause – define exactly what keys to return in the search results so you can quickly answer questions from log data and avoid superfluous information.

Easily view vital cloud alert context with Simplified Cloud Threat Alerts

This quarter we launched Simplified Cloud Threat Alerts within InsightIDR to make it easier to quickly understand what a cloud alert – like those from AWS GuardDuty – means, which can be a daunting task for even the most experienced analysts due to the scale and complexity of cloud environments.

With this new feature, you can view details and known issues with the resources (e.g. assets, users, etc.) implicated in the alert and have clarity on the steps that should be taken to appropriately respond to the alert. This will help you:

  • Quickly understand what a given cloud resource is, its intended purpose, what applications it supports and who “owns” it.
  • Get a clear picture around what an alert means, what next steps to take to verify the alert, or how to respond if the alert is in fact malicious.
  • Prioritize response efforts based on potential impact with insight into whether or not the compromised resource is misconfigured, has active vulnerabilities, or has been recently updated in a manner that signals potential pre-attack reconnaissance.

A growing library of actionable detections in InsightIDR

In Q1 2024 we added 1,349 new detection rules. See them in-product or visit the Detection Library for descriptions and recommendations.

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/12/21/whats-new-in-rapid7-products-services-2023-year-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review

Throughout 2023 Rapid7 has made investments across the Insight Platform to further our mission of providing security teams with the tools to proactively anticipate imminent risk, prevent breaches earlier, and respond faster to threats. In this blog you’ll find a review of our top releases from this past year, all of which were purpose-built to bring your team a holistic, unified approach to security operations and command of your attack surface.

Proactively secure your environment

Endpoint protection with next-gen antivirus in Managed Threat Complete

To provide protection against both known and unknown threats, we released multilayered prevention with Next-Gen Antivirus in Managed Threat Complete. Available through the Insight Agent, you’re immediately able to:

  • Block known and unknown threats early in the kill chain
  • Halt malware that’s built to bypass existing security controls
  • Maximize your security stack and ROI with existing Insight Agent
  • Leverage the expertise of our MDR team to triage and investigate these alerts

New capabilities to help prioritize risk in your cloud and on-premise environments and effectively communicate risk posture

As the attack surface expands, we know it’s critical for you to have visibility into vulnerabilities across your hybrid environments and communicate it with your executive and remediation stakeholders. This year we made a series of investments in this area to help customers better visualize, prioritize, and communicate risk.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
  • Executive Risk View, available as a part of Cloud Risk Complete, provides security leaders with the visibility and context needed to track total risk across cloud and on-premises assets to better understand organizational risk posture and trends.
  • Active Risk, our new vulnerability risk-scoring methodology, helps security teams prioritize vulnerabilities that are actively exploited or most likely to be exploited in the wild. Our approach enriches the latest version of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) with multiple threat intelligence feeds, including intelligence from proprietary Rapid7 Labs research. Active Risk normalizes risk scores across cloud and on-premises environments within InsightVM, InsightCloudSec, and Executive Risk View.
  • The new risk score in InsightCloudSec’s Layered Context makes it easier for you to understand the riskiest resources within your cloud environment. Much like Layered Context, the new risk score combines a variety of risk signals – including Active Risk – and assigns a higher risk score to resources that suffer from toxic combinations or multiple risk vectors that present an increased likelihood or impact of compromise.
  • Two new dashboard cards in InsightVM to help security teams communicate risk posture cross-functionally and provide context on asset and vulnerability prioritization:
  • Vulnerability Findings by Active Risk Score Severity – ideal for executive reporting, this dashboard card indicates total number of vulnerabilities across the Active Risk severity levels and number of affected assets and instances.
  • Vulnerability Findings by Active Risk Score Severity and Publish Age – ideal for sharing with remediation stakeholders to assist with prioritizing vulnerabilities for the next patch cycle, or identifying critical vulnerabilities that may have been missed.

Coverage and expert analysis for critical vulnerabilities with Rapid7 Labs

Rapid7 Labs provides easy-to-use threat intelligence and guidance, curated by our industry-leading attack experts, to the security teams.

Emergent Threat Response (ETR) program, part of Rapid7 Labs, provides teams with accelerated visibility, alerting, and guidance on high-priority threats. Over this past year we provided coverage and expert analysis within 24 hours for over 30 emergent threats, including Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer solution where our security research team was one of the first to detect exploitation—four days before the vendor issued public advisory. Keep up with future ETRs on our blog here.

Detect and prioritize threats anywhere, from the endpoint to the cloud

Enhanced alert details in InsightIDR Investigations

An updated evidence panel for attacker behavior analytics (ABA) alerts gives you a description of the alert and recommendations for triage, rule logic that generated the alert and associated data, and a process tree (for MDR customers) to show details about what occurred before, during, and after the alert was generated.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
Process tree details within alert details in InsightIDR

AI-driven detection of anomalous activity with Cloud Anomaly Detection

Cloud Anomaly Detection provides AI-driven detection of anomalous activity occurring across your cloud environments, with automated prioritization to assess the likelihood that activity is malicious. With Cloud Anomaly Detection, your team will benefit from:

  • A consolidated view that aggregates threat detections from CSP-native detection engines and Rapid7’s AI-driven proprietary detections.
  • Automated prioritization to focus on the activity that is most likely to be malicious.
  • The ability to detect and respond to cloud threats using the same processes and tools your SOC teams are using today with easy API-based ingestion into XDR/SIEM tools for threat investigations and prioritizing remediation efforts.

Detailed views into risks across your cloud environment with Identity Analysis and Attack Path Analysis

We’re constantly working to improve the ways with which we provide a real-time and comprehensive view of your current cloud risk posture. This year, we made some major strides in this area, headlined by two exciting new features:

  • Identity Analysis provides a unified view into identity-related risk across your cloud environments, allowing you to achieve least privileged access (LPA) at scale. By utilizing machine learning (ML), Identity Analysis builds a baseline of access patterns and permissions usage, and then correlates the baseline against assigned permissions and privileges. This enables your team to identify overly-permissive roles or unused access so you can automatically right-size permissions in accordance with LPA.
  • Attack Path Analysis enables you to analyze relationships between resources and quickly identify potential avenues bad actors could navigate within your cloud environment to exploit a vulnerable resource and/or access sensitive information. This visualization helps teams communicate risk across the organization, particularly for non-technical stakeholders that may find it difficult to understand why a compromised resource presents a potentially larger risk to the business.
What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review

More flexible alerting with Custom Detection Rules

Every environment, industry, and organization can have differing needs when it comes to detections. With custom detection rules in InsightIDR, you can detect threats specific to your needs while take advantage of the same capabilities that are available for out-of-the-box detection rules, including:

  • The ability to set a rule action and rule priority to choose how you are alerted when your rule detects suspicious activity.
  • The ability to add exceptions to your rule for specific key-value pairs.

A growing library of actionable detections in InsightIDR

In 2023 we added over 3,000 new detection rules. See them in-product or visit the Detection Library for descriptions and recommendations.

Agent-Based Policy supports custom policy assessment in InsightVM

Guidelines from Center for Internet Security (CIS) and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) are widely used industry benchmarks for configuration assessment. However, a benchmark or guideline as-is may not meet the unique needs of every business.

Agent-Based Policy assessment now supports Custom Policies. Global Administrators can customize built-in policies, upload policies, or enable a copy of existing custom policies for agent-based assessments. Learn more here.

Investigate and respond with confidence

Faster containment and remediation of threats with expansion of Active Response for Managed Detection and Response customers

Attackers work quickly and every second you wait to take action can have detrimental impacts on your environment. Enter automation—Active Response enables Rapid7 SOC analysts to immediately quarantine assets and users in a customer’s environment with response actions powered by InsightConnect, Rapid7’s SOAR solution.

Active Response has you covered to quarantine via our Insight Agent, as well as a variety of third-party providers—including Crowdstrike and SentinelOne. And with MDR analyst actions logged directly in InsightIDR, you have more expansive, collaborative detection and response faster than ever before. Read what Active Response can do for your organization—and how it stopped malware in a recent MDR Investigation—here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
Active Response in action: Rapid7 MDR analyst activity logged within InsightIDR Investigations timeline

Velociraptor integrates with InsightIDR for broader DFIR coverage

The attack surface is continually expanding, and so should your visibility into potential threats across it. This year we integrated Velociraptor, Rapid7’s open-source DFIR framework, with our Insight Platform to bring the data you need for daily threat monitoring and hunting into InsightIDR for investigation via our Insight Agent.

This integration brings you faster identification and remediation, always-on monitoring for threat activity across your endpoint fleet, and expanded threat detection capabilities. Read more about what this integration unlocks here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Products & Services: 2023 Year in Review
Velociraptor alert details in InsightIDR

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in product and service investments at Rapid7. See you in 2024!

Attackers are Working Around The Clock. Luckily, So Are We.

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/11/30/attackers-are-working-around-the-clock-luckily-so-are-we/

Attackers are Working Around The Clock. Luckily, So Are We.

It takes an average of 204 days for organizations to discover a breach, and from there an average of 73 days to contain it. With the average cost of a breach at an all time high of $4.45 million, there’s an undeniable need for teams to enlist the right experts to quickly eradicate threats.

At Rapid7, our expert SOC analysts detect and respond to threats end-to-end for MDR customers – no matter how large or complex. Rapid7’s Active Response, powered by InsightConnect SOAR Automation, enables our analysts to contain endpoints and users on your behalf within minutes of when a threat is identified, reducing attacker dwell time and keeping your organization safe from the damaging consequences of an attack.

24×7 Immediate Containment of Validated Threats with Active Response

Initially launched in 2020, we’ve now expanded Active Response to include broader asset quarantine support across third-party providers — including Crowdstrike, SentinelOne, Carbon Black Cloud, and more — as well as more transparency into MDR analyst activity to bring you more expansive, collaborative detection and response. What you can expect with Active Response:

  • Rapid7 MDR analysts will contain compromised endpoints or users as early in the killchain as possible to keep your organization safe from threats including malware, lateral movement, data exfiltration attempts, and more. We’ve also added a cloud-enabled option for actions to quarantine assets — removing the need for any on-prem components and making containment even faster for your organization.
  • Our team takes action on your behalf when we see a validated threat, but you have control of the parameters with the ability to create containment guardrails to prohibit the containment of critical servers, users, or devices. You always have the option to unquarantine assets or users directly from InsightIDR, making it extremely straightforward and keeping the power in your hands.
  • Rapid7’s coverage doesn’t stop there — with recommended additional actions for containment, remediation, and mitigation, our analysts ensure your organization is as secure as possible.

See How Active Response Stopped Malware in a Recent Rapid7 MDR Investigation

The following is a real-world example of a threat handled by our MDR analysts leveraging Active Response to quarantine an asset and stop malware.

Attacker Activity

  • [USER 1] working on legal cases used Chrome browser to visit a legitimate website compromised by malicious embedded JavaScript functions.
  • Embedded JavaScript file loaded pop-up, invited user to update browser by downloading ZIP archive containing JavaScript file.
  • Once executed, Javascript file communicated with Command and Control (C2) to download and execute a malicious payload, to fingerprint the asset, user, cached password, domains controllers, and trusted domains and output the results to a file at the root of [USER 1]’s %temp% directory to stage the host for subsequent exploitation.
Attackers are Working Around The Clock. Luckily, So Are We.

Build Resilience While You Sleep

Active Response enables teams to immediately quarantine malicious behavior before it can compromise a system, saving teams from the damaging outcomes of a successful security breach as well as costly ransomware, loss of data, and broken customer trust.

Whether it’s an intrusion attempt, suspicious process start activity, or anything in between, Rapid7’s SOC has their eyes on your environment 24x7x365, halting suspicious activity in its tracks so you can sleep peacefully through the night.

To learn more about Active Response, talk to your Customer Advisor or a representative.

What’s New in Rapid7 Detection & Response: Q3 2023 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/10/05/whats-new-in-rapid7-detection-response-q3-2023-in-review/

What’s New in Rapid7 Detection & Response: Q3 2023 in Review

This post takes a look at some of the investments we’ve made throughout Q3 2023 to our Detection and Response offerings to provide advanced DFIR capabilities with Velociraptor, more flexibility with custom detection rules, enhancements to our dashboard and log search features, and more.

Stop attacks before they happen with Next-Gen Antivirus in Managed Threat Complete

As endpoint attacks become more elusive and frequent, we know security teams need reliable coverage to keep their organizations safe. To provide teams with protection from both known and unknown threats, we’ve released multilayered prevention with Next-Gen Antivirus in Managed Threat Complete. Available through the Insight Agent, you’ll get immediate coverage with no additional configurations or deployments. With Managed Next-Gen Antivirus you’ll be able to:

  • Block known and unknown threats early in the kill chain
  • Halt malware that’s built to bypass existing security controls
  • Maximize your security stack and ROI with existing Insight Agent
  • Leverage the expertise of our MDR team to triage and investigate these alerts

To see more on our Managed Next-Gen Antivirus offering, including a demo walkthrough, visit our Endpoint Hub Page here.

Achieve faster DFIR outcomes with Velociraptor now integrated into the Insight Platform

As security teams are facing more and more persistent threats on their endpoints, it’s crucial to have proactive security measures that can identify attacks early in the kill chain, and the ability to access detailed evidence to drive complete remediation. We’re excited to announce that InsightIDR Ultimate customers can now recognize the value of Velociraptor, Rapid7’s open-source DFIR framework, faster than ever with its new integration into the Insight Platform.

With no additional deployment or configurations required, InsightIDR customers can deploy Velociraptor through their existing Insight Agents for daily threat monitoring and hunting, swift threat response, and expanded threat detection capabilities. For more details, check out our recent blog post here.

What’s New in Rapid7 Detection & Response: Q3 2023 in Review

A view of Velociraptor in InsightIDR

Tailor alerts to your unique needs with Custom Detection Rules

We know every organization has unique needs when it comes to detections and alerting on threats. While InsightIDR provides over 3,000 out-of-the-box detection rules to detect malicious behaviors, we’ve added additional capabilities with Custom Detection Rules to offer teams the ability to author rules tailored to their own individual needs. With Custom Detection Rules, you will be able to:

  • Build upon Rapid7’s library of expertly curated detection rules by creating rules that uniquely fit your organization’s security needs
  • Use LEQL to write rule logic against a variety of data sources
  • Add grouping and threshold conditions to refine your rule logic over specific periods of time to decrease unnecessary noise
  • Assess the rules activity before it starts to trigger alerts for downstream teams
  • Group alerts by specific keys such as by user or by asset within investigations to reduce triage time
  • Create exceptions and view modification history as you would with out-of-the-box ABA detection rules
  • Attach InsightConnect automation workflows to your custom rules to mitigate manual tasks such as containing assets and enriching data, or set up notifications when detections occur
What’s New in Rapid7 Detection & Response: Q3 2023 in Review

Creating a Custom Detection Rule in InsightIDR

Enhanced Attacker Behavior Analytics (ABA) alert details in Investigations

Easily view information about your ABA alerts that are a part of an investigation with our updated Evidence panel. With these updates, you’ll see more information on alerts, including their source event data and detection rule logic that generated them. Additionally, the Evidence button has also been renamed to Alert Details to more accurately reflect its function.

New alert details include:

  • A brief description of the alert and a recommendation for triage
  • The detection rule logic that generated the alert and the corresponding key-value payload from your environment
  • The process tree, which displays details about the process that occurred when the alert was generated and the processes that occurred before and after (only for MDR customers)

Dashboard Improvements: Revamped card builder and a new heat map visualization

Our recently released revamped card builder provides more functionality to make it faster and easier to build dashboard cards. For a look at what’s new, check out the demo below.

The new calendar heat map visualization allows you to more easily visualize trends in your data over time so you can quickly spot trends and anomalies. To see this new visualization in action, check out the demo below.

Export data locally with new Log Search option

You now have more flexibility when it comes to exporting your log search data, making it easier to gather evidence related to incidents for additional searching, sharing with others in your organization, or gathering evidence associated with incidents.

With this update you can now:

  • Use edit key selection to define what columns to export to csv
  • Export results from a grouby/calculate query to a csv file

New event sources

  • Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS): A web server that is used to exchange web content with internet users. Read the documentation
  • Amazon Security Lake: A security data lake service that allows customers to aggregate & manage security-related logs. Read the documentation
  • Salesforce Threat Detection: Uses machine learning to detect threats within a Salesforce organization. Read the documentation

A growing library of actionable detections

In Q3 2023 we added 530 new ABA detection rules. See them in-product or visit the Detection Library for actionable descriptions and recommendations.

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in detection and response at Rapid7.

360-Degree XDR and Attack Surface Coverage With Rapid7

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/08/18/360-degree-xdr-and-attack-surface-coverage-with-rapid7/

360-Degree XDR and Attack Surface Coverage With Rapid7

Today’s already resource-constrained security teams are tasked with protecting more as environments sprawl and alerts pile up, while attackers continue to get stealthier and add to their arsenal. To be successful against bad actors, security teams need to be proactive against evolving attacks in their earliest stages and ready to detect and respond to advanced threats that make it past defenses (because they will).

Eliminate blindspots and extinguish threats earlier and faster

Rapid7’s external threat intelligence solution, Threat Command, reduces the noise of numerous threat feeds and external sources, and prioritizes and alerts on the most relevant threats to your organization. When used alongside InsightIDR, Rapid7’s next-gen SIEM and XDR, and InsightConnect, Rapid7’s SOAR solution, you’ll unlock a complete view of your internal and external attack surface with unmatched signal to noise.

Leverage InsightIDR, Threat Command, and InsightConnect to:

  • Gain 360-degree visibility with expanded coverage beyond the traditional network perimeter thanks to Threat Command alerts being ingested into InsightIDR, giving you a more holistic picture of your threat landscape.
  • Proactively thwart attack plans with Threat Command alerts that identify active threats from across your attack surface.
  • Find and eliminate threats faster when you correlate and investigate Threat Command alerts with InsightIDR’s rich investigative capabilities.
  • Automate your response by attaching an InsightConnect workflow to take action as soon as a detection or a Threat Command alert surfaces in InsightIDR.
360-Degree XDR and Attack Surface Coverage With Rapid7
Threat Command alerts alongside InsightIDR Detection Rules

Stronger signal to noise with Threat Command Threat Library

The power of InsightIDR and Threat Command doesn’t end there. We added another layer to our threat intelligence earlier this year when we integrated Threat Command’s Threat Library into InsightIDR to give more visibility into new indicators of compromise (IOCs) and continued strength around signal to noise.

All IOCs related to threat actors tracked in Threat Command are automatically applied to customer data sent to InsightIDR, which means you automatically get current and future coverage as new IOCs are found by the research team. Alongside InsightIDR’s variety of detection types — User Behavior Analytics (UBA), Attacker Behavior Analytics (ABA), and custom detections — you’re covered against all infiltrations, from lateral movement to unique attacker behaviors and everything in between. The impact? Your team is never behind on emerging threats to your organization.

Faster, more efficient responses with InsightConnect

Strong signal to noise is taken a step further with automation, so teams can not only identify threats quickly but respond immediately. The expanded integration between InsightConnect and InsightIDR allows you to respond to any alert being generated in your environment. With this, you can easily create and map InsightConnect workflows to any ABA, UBA, or custom detection rule, so tailored response actions can be initiated as soon as there is a new detection.

See something suspicious that didn’t trip a detection? You can invoke on-demand automation with integrated Quick Actions from any page in InsightIDR.

360-Degree XDR and Attack Surface Coverage With Rapid7
Mapping of InsightConnect workflows to an ABA alert in InsightIDR

Sophisticated XDR without any headaches

With Rapid7, you’ll achieve sophisticated detection and response outcomes with greater efficiency and efficacy — no matter where you and your team are on your security journey. Stay up to date on the latest from InsightIDR, Threat Command, and InsightConnect as we continue to up-level our cross-product integrations to bring you the most comprehensive XDR solution.

Additional reading:

NEVER MISS A BLOG

Get the latest stories, expertise, and news about security today.

Simplify SIEM Optimization With InsightIDR

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/07/22/simplify-siem-optimization-with-insightidr/

Two key ways InsightIDR helps customers tailor reporting, detection, and response — without any headaches

Simplify SIEM Optimization With InsightIDR

For far too many years, security teams have accepted that with a SIEM comes compromise. You could have highly tailored and custom rule sets, but it meant endless amounts of tuning and configuration to create and manage them. You could have pre-built content, but that meant rigidity and noise. You could have all the dashboard bells and whistles, but that meant finding the unicorn that knew how to navigate them. Too many defenders have carried this slog, accepting this traditional SIEM reality as “it is what it is.” No more!

It’s possible to have it all — an intuitive interface and sophisticated tuning and customization

With InsightIDR, Rapid7’s leading SIEM and XDR, you can have the best of both worlds — an easy-to-use tool that’s also incredibly sophisticated. InsightIDR makes it easy and intuitive to tune your detections (without heavy script-writing or configuration required). When it comes to viewing your environment’s data and sharing key metrics, our Dashboard Library and reports are readily available and highly customizable for your unique needs.

Filter out the noise with fine-tuned alerts

Every time an analyst creates an alert it takes work. At Rapid7, we want to save you time and advance your security posture — which is where our Detections Library comes in. Curated and managed by our MDR SOC team, you can rest assured that you’ll only be alerted to behaviors that are worthy of human review so that you can make the most out of your limited time and focus on the threats that really matter.

While we focus on creating a curated, high-fidelity library of detections, we know each environment has its unique challenges — which is why our attacker behavior analytics (ABA) detections are robustly tuneable. You can also get more granular with your tuning and take the following actions:

  • Create custom alerts when your organization calls for niche detections.
  • Customize UBA directions so you’re in control of which you have turned on to align your alerting with your environment.
  • Modify ABA detections by changing the rule action, modifying its priority, and adding exceptions to the rule.
  • Stay on top of potential noise with Relative Activity, a new score for ABA detection rules that analyzes and identifies detection rules that might cause frequent investigations or notable events if switched on, as well as determines which rules may benefit from tuning, either by changing the Rule Action or adding exceptions.

Customize dashboards and reports to best suit your team

With InsightIDR, teams have access to over 45 (and counting) dashboards out of the box — from compliance dashboards for frameworks like HIPAA or ISO to Active Directory Admin Activity — to help your team focus on driving faster decision-making.

Analysts can also leverage this pre-built content as a springboard for customizing their own reports. InsightIDR provides multiple query modes and methods for creating data visualizations — so whether you are more comfortable with loose keyword search, working in our intuitive query language, or simply clicking on charts to narrow down results — every analyst can operate as an expert, regardless of their prior SIEM experience.

Simplify SIEM Optimization With InsightIDR
Easily edit dashboard card properties

InsightIDR also makes it easy to share findings and important metrics with anyone in your organization — send an interactive HTML or PDF report of any dashboard with the click of a button.

Simplify SIEM Optimization With InsightIDR
Create HTML reports in InsightIDR

Check out the other ways InsightIDR can help drive successful detection and response for your team here.

Additional reading:

NEVER MISS A BLOG

Get the latest stories, expertise, and news about security today.

What’s New in InsightIDR: Q2 2022 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/07/06/whats-new-in-insightidr-q2-2022-in-review/

What's New in InsightIDR: Q2 2022 in Review

This Q2 2022 recap post takes a look at some of the latest investments we’ve made to InsightIDR to drive detection and response forward for your organization.

New interactive HTML reports

InsightIDR’s new HTML reports incorporate the interactive features you know and love from our dashboards delivered straight to your inbox. The HTML report file is sent as an email attachment and allows you to scroll through tables, drill in and out of cards, and sort tables in the same way you would explore dashboards.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q2 2022 in Review

Increased visibility into malware activity

Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) can be noisy. Rapid7’s Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering (TIDE) team has carefully analyzed thousands of IDS events to curate a list of only the most critical and actionable events. We’ve recently expanded our library to include over 4,500 curated IDS detection rules to help customers detect activity associated with thousands of common pieces of malware.

Catch data exfiltration attempts with Anomalous Data Transfer

Anomalous Data Transfer (ADT) is a new Attacker Behavior Analytics (ABA) detection rule that uses the Insight Network Sensor to identify large transfers of data sent by assets on a network. ADT outputs data exfiltration alerts which make it easier for you to monitor transfer activity and identify unusual behavior to stay ahead of threats. These new detections are available for select InsightIDR packages — see more details here in our documentation.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q2 2022 in Review

Build stronger integrations and quickly triage investigations with new InsightIDR APIs

Investigation management APIs

Our new APIs allow you to extract more extensive data from within your investigation and use it to integrate with third-party tools, or build automation workflows to help you save time analyzing and closing investigations. View our documentation to learn more.

  • Update one or more Investigation fields through a single API call
  • Retrieve a sortable list of Investigations
  • Search Investigations
  • Create a Manual Investigation

User, accounts, and asset APIs

We are excited to release new APIs to allow you to programmatically interface with InsightIDR users, accounts, local accounts, and assets. You can use these APIs to configure new automations that further contextualize alerts generated by InsightIDR or third-party tools and help you to create more actionable views of alert data.

Relative Activity: A new way to analyze detection rules

We’ve introduced a new score called Relative Activity to ABA detection rules that analyzes how often the Rule Logic matches data in your environment based on certain parameters. The Relative Activity score is calculated over a rolling 24-hour period and can help you:

  • Identify detection rules that might cause frequent investigations or notable events if switched on
  • Determine which rules may benefit from tuning, either by changing the Rule Action or adding exceptions
What's New in InsightIDR: Q2 2022 in Review
New Relative Activity score for detection rules

Log Search improvements

Enrich Log Search results with new Quick Actions: Earlier this year InsightIDR and InsightConnect teamed up to create Quick Actions, a new feature that provides instant automation within InsightIDR to reduce time to respond to investigations, all with the click of a button. We’ve recently released new Quick Actions to enable pre-configured actions within InsightIDR’s Log Search for InsightIDR Ultimate and InsightIDR legacy customers. Quick Actions are available for select InsightIDR packages, see more details here in our documentation.

  • Use AWS S3 as a collection method for custom logs: Now customers have the choice to use either Cisco Umbrella or AWS S3 as a collection method when setting up custom logs. Alongside this update, we’ve also refactored the data source to make it more resilient and effective.

A growing library of actionable detections

In Q2, we added 290 new ABA detection rules to InsightIDR. See them in-product or visit the Detection Library for actionable descriptions and recommendations.

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in detection and response at Rapid7.

Additional reading:

NEVER MISS A BLOG

Get the latest stories, expertise, and news about security today.

The Average SIEM Deployment Takes 6 Months. Don’t Be Average.

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/06/02/the-average-siem-deployment-takes-6-months-dont-be-average/

The Average SIEM Deployment Takes 6 Months. Don’t Be Average.

If you’re part of the huge growth in demand for cloud-based SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), claim your copy of the new Gartner® Report: “How to Deploy a SIEM Solution Successfully.”

Depending on what SIEM you choose, and how you approach the process, getting to operational and effective can take days, or months, or a lot longer.

Here are the Gartner report’s key findings:

  1. “Ineffective security information and event management (SIEM) deployments occur when requirements and use cases are not aligned with the organization’s risks and risk tolerance.”
  2. “Clients deploying SIEM solutions continue to take an unstructured approach when deciding which event and data sources to onboard, with the goal of getting every source in from the beginning. This leads to long and complex implementations, cost overruns, and higher probabilities of stalled or failed implementations.”
  3. “SIEM buyers struggle to choose between on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments due to the complexities created by the various environments that need to be monitored, e.g., on-premises, SaaS, cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS), remote workers.”

SIEM centralizes and visualizes your security data to help you identify anomalies in your environment. But nearly all SIEMs require you to do a ton of customizing and configuration. Nearly all disappoint with their detections. And nearly all will exhaust you with false-positive alerts… every hour of every day… until analysts start ignoring alerts, which will surely doom you someday.

Now, here’s what we think

Rapid7 began building InsightIDR nearly a decade ago. While the threat landscape keeps changing, our mission never has: to empower you to find and extinguish evil earlier, faster, easier.

InsightIDR has never been a traditional SIEM. You should consider it if:

Fast deployment is a priority to you. InsightIDR leads the SIEM market in deployment times. With SaaS delivery and a native cloud foundation, customers can be deployed and operational in days and weeks – not months and years.

Time-to-value and tangible ROI matter to your leadership team. InsightIDR combines the best of next-gen SIEM with native extended detection and response (XDR). Get highly correlated UEBA, EDR, NDR, and Cloud detections alongside your critical security logs and policy monitoring, compliance dashboards, and reporting in a single pane of glass.

Your team is tired of false positives. InsightIDR’s expertly vetted detection library provides holistic threat coverage across your entire attack surface. An emphasis on high-fidelity, low-noise detections ensures that all alerts are relevant and ready for action.

You’re ready to accelerate your security posture. InsightIDR empowers teams to up-level their security and achieve sophisticated outcomes – without the complexity of traditional SIEMs. Embedded security orchestration and automation (SOAR) capabilities give you enviable security operations center (SOC) automation and enable even new analysts to respond like experts.

Don’t forget your copy of the new Gartner® Report: “How to Deploy a SIEM Solution Successfully.”

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner, How to Deploy a SIEM Solution Successfully, Andrew Davies, Mitchell Schneider, Toby Bussa, Kelly Kavanagh, 7 July 2021

Additional reading:

NEVER MISS A BLOG

Get the latest stories, expertise, and news about security today.

What’s New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/04/05/whats-new-in-insightidr-q1-2022-in-review/

Introducing new InsightIDR capabilities to accelerate your detection and response program

What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

When we talk to customers and security professionals about what they need more of in their security operations center (SOC), there is one consistent theme: time. InsightIDR — Rapid7’s leading cloud SIEM and XDR — helps teams cut through the noise and accelerate their detection and response, without sacrificing comprehensive coverage across modern environments and advanced attacks. This Q1 2022 recap post digs into some of the latest investments we’ve made to drive tangible time savings for customers, while still leveling up your detection and response program with InsightIDR.

New InsightIDR Detections powered by Threat Command by Rapid7’s TIP Threat Library

Following Rapid7’s 2021 acquisition of IntSights and their leading external threat intelligence solution, Threat Command, we are excited to provide InsightIDR customers with new built-in threat intelligence via Threat Command’s threat intelligence platform (TIP).

We have integrated Threat Command’s TIP ThreatLibrary into InsightIDR, bringing its threat intelligence content into our detection library to ensure Rapid7 InsightIDR and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) customers have the most up-to-date and comprehensive detection coverage, more visibility into new IOCs, and continued strength around signal-to-noise.

Using the combined threat intelligence research teams across Rapid7 Threat Command and our services organization, this content will be maintained and updated across the platform – ensuring our customers get real-time protection from evolving threats.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

InsightIDR delivers superior signal-to-noise in latest MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK evaluation

We’re excited to share that InsightIDR has successfully completed the 2022 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation, which focused on how adversaries abuse data encryption for exploitation and/or ransomware. This evaluation tested InsightIDR’s EDR capabilities (powered by our native endpoint agent, the Insight Agent) and our ability to detect these advanced attacks. A few key takeaways and result highlights:

  • InsightIDR demonstrated solid visibility across the cyber kill chain – with visibility across 18 of the 19 phases covered across both simulations.
  • Consistently identified threats early, with alerts firing in the first phase – Initial Compromise – for both the Wizard Spider and Sandworm attacks.
  • Showcased our commitment to signal-to-noise – with targeted and focused detections across each phase of the attack (versus firing loads of alerts for every minute substep).

As our customers know, EDR is just one component of the detection coverage unlocked with InsightIDR. While beyond the scope of this evaluation, beyond endpoint coverage, InsightIDR delivers defense in depth across users and log activity, network, and cloud. Learn more about InsightIDR’s MITRE evaluation results in our recent blog post.

Investigate in seconds with Quick Actions powered by InsightConnect

InsightIDR and InsightConnect teamed up to create Quick Actions, a new feature that provides instant automation within InsightIDR to reduce time to respond to investigations, all with the click of a button.

Quick Actions are pre-configured automation actions that customers can run within their InsightIDR instance to get the answers they need fast and make the investigative process more efficient, and there’s no configuration required. Some Quick Actions use cases include:

  • Threat hunting within log search. Use the “Look Up File Hash with Threat Crowd” quick action to learn more about a hash within an endpoint log. If the output of the quick action finds the file hash is malicious, you can choose to investigate further.
  • More context around alerts in Investigations. Use the “Look Up Domain with WHOIS” quick action to receive more context around an IP associated with an alert in an investigation.



What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

More customizability with AWS GuardDuty detection rules

We now have over 100 new AWS GuardDuty Attacker Behavior Analytics (ABA) detection rules to provide significantly more customization and tuning ability for customers compared to our previous singular third-party AWS GuardDuty UBA detection rule. With these new ABA alerts, it’s possible to set rule actions, tune rule priorities, or add an exception on each individual GuardDuty detection rule.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

New pre-built CIS control dashboards and overall dashboard improvements

We’re continually expanding our pre-built dashboard library to allow users to easily visualize their data within the context of common frameworks.

The CIS Critical Security Controls are a recommended set of actions for cyber defense that provide specific and actionable ways to thwart the most pervasive attacks. We know CIS is one of the most common security frameworks our customers consider, so we’ve recently added 3 new CIS control dashboards that cover CIS Control 5: Account Management, CIS Control 9: Email and Web Browser Protections, and CIS Control 10: Malware Defenses.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

We also continue to make changes and additions to our overall Dashboard capabilities. Within the card builder, we’ve added the ability to:

  • Change chart colors
  • Add a chart caption
  • Swap between linear and logarithmic scale for charts
  • Add data labels on top of dashboard charts

Continuous improvements to Investigation Management

Another area we are continuously making improvements in is Investigation Management. A huge part of this ongoing development is customer feedback, and over the last quarter, we’ve made some additions to the experience based on just that. We’ve added:

  • New filters for alert type, MITRE ATT&CK tactic, and investigation type to provide more options when it comes to tailoring the list view of investigations
  • The new “notes count” feature, which allows customers to save time and track the status of an ongoing collaboration within an investigation
  • Improvements to the bulk-close feature within Investigation Management, and new progress banners so you can easily track the status of each bulk-close request
What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

Other updates

  • New CATO Networks event source can now be configured to send InsightIDR WAN firewall and internet firewall data.
  • Log Search Syntax Highlighting applies different colors and formatting to the distinct components of a LEQL query (such as the search logic and values) to improve overall readability and provide an easy way to identify potential errors within queries.
  • New curated IDS Rules powered by the Insight Network Sensor help you detect activity associated with thousands of common pieces of malware.
  • Insight Network Sensor management page updates make it easier to deploy and maintain your fleet of Network Sensors. We’ve rebuilt the sensor management page to better surface critical configuration statuses, diagnostic information, and links to support documentation.
What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in detection and response at Rapid7.

Additional reading:

NEVER MISS A BLOG

Get the latest stories, expertise, and news about security today.

What’s New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/01/06/whats-new-in-insightidr-q4-2021-in-review/

What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review

More context and customization around detections and investigations, expanded dashboard capabilities, and more.

This post offers a closer look at some of the recent releases in InsightIDR, our extended detection and response (XDR) solution, from Q4 2021. Over the past quarter, we delivered updates to help you make more informed decisions, accelerate your time to respond, and customize your detections and investigations. Here’s a rundown of the highlights.

More customization options for your detection rules

InsightIDR provides a highly curated detections library, vetted by the security and operations center (SOC) experts on our managed detection and response (MDR) team — but we know some teams may want the ability to fine tune these even further. In our Q3 wrap-up, we highlighted our new detection rules management experience. This quarter, we’ve made even more strides in leveling up our capabilities around detections to help you make more informed decisions and accelerate your time to respond.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review
Attacker Behavior Analytics Detection Rules viewed and sorted by rule priority

  • New detection rules management interface: With this new interface, you can see a priority field for each detection provided by InsightIDR with new actions available.
    • Change priority of detections and exceptions that are set to Creates Investigation as the Rule Action.
    • View and sort on priority from the main detection management screen.
    • More details on our detection rules experience can be found in our help docs, here.

  • Customizable priorities for UBA detection rules and custom alerts: Customers can now associate a rule priority (Critical, High, Medium, or Low) for all of their UBA and custom alert detection rules. The priority is subsequently applied to investigations created by a detection rule.
  • A simplified way to create exceptions: We added a new section to detection rule details within “create exception” to better inform on which data to write exceptions against. This will show up to the 5 most recent matches associated with that said detection rule — so now, when you go to write exceptions, you have all the information you may need all within one window.

MITRE ATT&CK Matrix for detection rules

This new view maps detection rules to MITRE tactics and techniques commonly used by attackers. The view lets you see where you have coverage with Rapid7’s out-of-the-box detection rules for common attacker use cases and dig into each rule to understand the nature of that detection.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review
MITRE ATT&CK Matrix within Detection Rules

Investigation Management reimagined

At Rapid7, we know how limited a security analyst’s time is, so we reconfigured our Investigation Management experience to help our users improve the speed and quality of their decision-making when it comes to investigations. Here’s what you can expect:

  • A revamped user interface with expandable cards displaying investigation information
  • The ability to view, set, and update the priority, status, or disposition of an investigation
  • Filtering by the following fields: date range, assignee, status, priority level
What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review
New investigations interface

We also introduced MITRE-driven insights in Investigations. Now, you can click into the new MITRE ATT&CK tab of the Evidence panel in Investigation to see descriptions of each tactic, technique, and sub-technique curated by MITRE and link out to attack.mitre.org for more information.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review
MITRE ATT&CK tab within Investigations Evidence panel

Rapid7’s ongoing emergent threat response to Log4Shell

Like the rest of the security community, we have been internally responding to the critical remote code execution vulnerability in Apache’s Log4j Java library (a.k.a. Log4Shell).

Through continuous collaboration and ongoing threat landscape monitoring, our Incident Response, Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering, and MDR teams are working together to provide product coverage for the latest techniques being used by malicious actors. You can see updates on our InsightIDR and MDR detection coverage here and in-product.

Stay up to date with the latest on Log4Shell:

A continually expanding library of pre-built dashboards

InsightIDR’s Dashboard Library has a growing repository of pre-built dashboards to save you time and eliminate the need for you to build them from scratch. In Q4, we released 15 new pre-built dashboards covering:

  • Compliance (PCI, HIPAA, ISO)
  • General Security (Firewall, Asset Authentication)
  • Security Tools (Okta, Palo Alto, Crowdstrike)
  • Enhanced Network Traffic Analysis
  • Cloud Security
What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review
Dashboard Library in InsightIDR

Additional dashboard and reporting updates

  • Updates to dashboard filtering: Dashboard Filtering gives users the ability to further query LEQL statements and the data across all the cards in their dashboard. Customers can now populate the dashboard filter with Saved Queries from Log Search, as well as save a filter to a dashboard, eliminating the need to rebuild it every session.
  • Chart captions: We’ve added the ability for users to write plain text captions on charts to provide extra context about a visualization.
  • Multi-group-by queries and drill-in functionality: We’ve enabled Multi-group-by queries (already being used in Log search) so that customers can leverage these in their dashboards and create cards with layered data that they can drill in and out of.

Updates to Log Search and Event Sources

We recently introduced Rapid7 Resource Names (RRN), which are unique identifiers added to users, assets, and accounts in log search. An RRN serves as a unique identifier for platform resources at Rapid7. This unique identifier will stay consistent with the resource regardless of any number of names/labels associated with the resource.

In log search, an “R7_context” object has been added for log sets that have an attributed user, asset, account, or local accounts. Within the “R7_context” object, you will see any applicable RRNs appended. You can utilize the RRN as a search in log search or in the global search (which will link to users and accounts or assets and endpoints pages) to assist with more reliable searches for investigation processes.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review
New “r7_context” Rapid7 Resource Name (RRN) data in Log Search

Event source updates

  • Log Line Attribution for Palo Alto Firewall & VPN, Proofpoint TAP, Fortinet Fortigate: When setting up an event source you now have an option to leverage information directly present in source log lines, rather than relying solely on InsightIDR’s traditional attribution engine.
  • Cylance Protect Cloud event source: You can configure CylancePROTECT cloud to send detection events to InsightIDR to generate virus infection and third-party alerts.
  • InsightIDR Event Source listings available in the Rapid7 Extensions Hub: Easily access all InsightIDR event source related content in a centralized location.

Updates to Network Traffic Analysis capabilities

Insight Network Sensor optimized for 10Gbs+ deployments: We have introduced a range of performance upgrades that make high-speed traffic analysis more accessible using off-the-shelf hardware, so you’re able to gain east-west and north-south traffic visibility within physical, virtual and cloud based networks. If you want to take full advantage of these updates check out the updated sensor requirements here.

InsightIDR Asset Page Updates: We have introduced additional data elements and visuals to the Assets page. This delivers greater context for investigations and enables faster troubleshooting, as assets and user information is in one location. All customers have access to:

  • Top IDS events triggered by asset
  • Top DNS queries

For customers with Insight Network Sensors and ENTA, these additional elements are available:

  • Top Applications
  • Countries by Asset Location
  • Top Destination IP Addresses
What's New in InsightIDR: Q4 2021 in Review

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in detection and response at Rapid7.

Building Threat-Informed Defenses: Rapid7 Experts Share Their Thoughts on MITRE ATT&CK

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/11/04/building-threat-informed-defenses-rapid7-experts-share-their-thoughts-on-mitre-att-ck/

Building Threat-Informed Defenses: Rapid7 Experts Share Their Thoughts on MITRE ATT&CK

MITRE ATT&CK is considered by practitioners and the analyst community to be the most comprehensive framework of cybersecurity attacks and mitigation techniques available today. MITRE helps the security industry speak the same language and stick to a well-known, common framework.

To get more details on MITRE’s ATT&CK Matrix for Enterprise and its impact, I spoke with 3 members of Rapid7’s Managed Detection and Response team who have firsthand experience working with this framework every day — read our conversation below!

Laying some groundwork here, what are your thoughts on the MITRE ATT&CK framework?

John Fenninger, Manager of Rapid7’s Detection and Response Services, kicked us off by sharing his perspective:

“MITRE ATT&CK is an incredibly valuable framework for both vendors and customers. From things like compliance to more immediate needs like investigating an ongoing attack, MITRE makes it easy to see specific techniques that customers may not have heard of and helps think of tactical moves customers can protect against. With InsightIDR specifically, we align our detections to MITRE to give both our MDR SOC analysts and customers visibility into how far along a threat is on the ATT&CK chain.”

Rapid7 is not only a consumer of the MITRE ATT&CK Framework but an active contributor as well — in 2020, Rapid7 Incident Response Consultant Ted Samuels made a contribution to MITRE around a discovery for group policy objects that is now in the latest version of the ATT&CK framework.

Can you share your perspective on how the MITRE framework is used, and by who?

When it comes to leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK framework, there are 2 key audiences to consider, says Rapid7’s Senior Detection & Response Analyst, Vidya Tambe:

“There are 2 main categories of users — people who write detections and people who do the analysis of the detections, and the MITRE framework is important for both. From the analyst side, we want to know what stage of attack each alert is at, and based on where the alert falls, we know how critical an incident is. With MITRE, we can track how an attacker got to where they are and what kind of escalations they did — overall, it helps us back-track to see what they were able to compromise.

“From the detection writing standpoint, we want to stop attacks before they get too far into someone’s environment. Attacker techniques are always evolving, and while we aim to write detections for all the phases, a primary focus is to try and write detections early on to stop attackers as early in the ATT&CK chain as possible.”

What advice do you have for security teams when it comes to leveraging the MITRE framework to drive successful detection and response?

Rapid7 Detection and Response Analyst Carlo Anez Mazurco shared some advice for teams when it comes to using the MITRE framework at their organization:

“The MITRE Framework allows us to build a threat-informed defense. It shows us the 3 main areas that we need to focus on for data collection, data analysis, and expansion of detections. For teams to successfully utilize the MITRE framework, they need visibility into the following data sources at a minimum:

  • Process and process command line monitoring can be collected via Sysmon, Windows Event Logs, and many EDR platforms
  • File and registry monitoring is also often collected by Sysmon, Windows Event Logs, and many EDR platforms
  • Authentication logs collected from the domain controller
  • Packet capture, especially east/west capture, such as those collected between hosts and enclaves in your network

“Teams need a platform like InsightIDR, Rapid7’s extended detection and response solution, where the data from all of these sources can be ingested. Whatever platform or tool teams choose to use for this data ingestion should include MITRE mappings to attacker behaviors to understand what attackers are trying to do inside our environment at each stage, the TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, Procedures) of each threat actor should be documented in each alert — InsightIDR maps its detections to the MITRE framework to do just this for users.”

You mentioned InsightIDR has MITRE mapping — can you dig a little more into how this impacts customers?

“Our InsightIDR platform helps our customers collect all the necessary data sources,” Carlo continued. “That includes process and process command line monitoring via our endpoint Insight Agent, as well as file monitoring. Plus, authentication logs are collected from domain controllers and also via the Insight Agent, and network flow inside the environment can be gathered through our Insight Network Sensor.

“Our ABA and UBA detections are mapped to the MITRE framework to show our customers which TTPs are the most commonly used by threat actors in their environment, and it gives an insight into the attack patterns in real time. You can see an example of this in one of our past Rapid7 Threat Reports here.

“Additionally, our Rapid7 Threat Intelligence team is always developing new threat detections based on the threat intelligence feeds and public repositories of attacker behaviors. These new detections are mapped to the TTPs inside the MITRE framework and pushed out to all Rapid7 customers.”

We also recently released a new view of Detection Rules in InsightIDR where all detections are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework, and users can see associated MITRE tactics, techniques, and sub-techniques for detections while performing an investigation.

Interested in learning more?

As you can see, we really value the MITRE ATT&CK framework here at Rapid7. With InsightIDR your detections are vetted by a team of professional SOC analysts and mapped to MITRE to take the guessing game of what an attacker might do next.

If you’re looking to hear more from us on MITRE, watch a quick 3-minute rundown on the framework here.

What’s New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/10/05/whats-new-in-insightidr-q3-2021-in-review/

What's New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

This post offers a closer look at some of the recent updates and releases in InsightIDR, our extended detection and response solution, from Q3 2021.

Welcome IntSights to the Rapid7 Insight Platform family!

As you may have seen in recent communications, Rapid7 acquired IntSights, a leading provider of external threat intelligence and remediation. We’re excited to introduce their flagship external threat intelligence product, Threat Command, as part of our Rapid7 portfolio. Threat Command allows any SecOps team, regardless of size or capability maturity, to expand identification and remediation across an ever-expanding attack surface, while automating threat mitigation.

New detection rule management experience

We’re excited to announce that InsightIDR customers now have more customization and increased visibility for Attacker Behavior Analytics (ABA) detections. We’re continuing to make improvements and additions to our detections management experience — here are the latest additions:

  • Detection rules — Filter detection rules by threat group, rule behavior, and attributes for more visibility into your alerts and investigations.
  • MITRE ATT&CK mapping — View and filter detections by specific MITRE ATT&CK framework tactics and techniques for more context to the alerts in your environment.
  • Create exceptions to a detection rule — In the past, IDR customers could only turn alerts on or off for notable events. Now, you can create an exception that allows you to filter out noise and turn off detections based on key value pairs.

See the latest detection management experience in the demo below:

What's New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

526 new ABA detection rules added to IDR

We’ve also added 526 new ABA detection rules into InsightIDR to expand its coverage of Windows, Mac, and Linux suspicious process threats, covering a wide variety of techniques on the MITRE ATT&CK matrix. These detection rules can be tuned to your environment by creating exceptions and modifying the rule action to only receive the alerts you care about. Visit the Detection Library for actionable descriptions and recommendations.

MITRE ATT&CK details in investigations

In addition to our detections updates, we’ve made improvements to our investigations experience to provide deeper insight into an attacker’s position in the killchain and give context into the nature of an alert.

When performing an investigation in InsightIDR, detections will be mapped to a description of the associated MITRE tactics, techniques, and sub-techniques. You’ll also be prompted to visit attack.mitre.org to view context rich adversary behavior profiles with descriptions, mitigation strategies, and detection recommendations for each tactic, technique and sub-technique, developed by MITRE.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

Monitor event source health

We recently released new visual tools to help you easily view the health of your event source data. You now have extensive visibility into data transmission and parsing rates of your event source. This allows you to check if an event source is running as intended, quickly identify any issues or unusual activity, or visually compare data for each event source.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

New pre-built dashboards for HIPAA, ISO 27001, and more

We recently introduced a library of pre-built dashboards that make it easier than ever to get insight from your environment. Entire dashboards, created by our Rapid7 experts, can be set up in just a few clicks. Our dashboards cover a variety of topics, including key compliance frameworks like PCI, ISO 27001, and HIPAA; security tools like Zscaler and Okta; and more general dashboards covering Asset Authentication and Firewall activity.

What's New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

The Lost Bots vlog series

Rapid7’s latest vlog series, The Lost Bots, hosted by Detection and Response Practice Advisor and former CISO Jeffrey Gardner, offers a look into the latest and greatest in security. In each episode, Jeffrey talks with fellow industry experts about current events and trends in the security space, best practices, and lessons from our Rapid7 SOC team. Each episode is available on our blog, as well as our Rapid7 YouTube channel.

Rapid7 MDR named an IDC MarketScape Leader

We’re thrilled that Rapid7’s MDR was recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Managed Detection and Response 2021 Vendor Assessment. This IDC MarketScape report shows an unbiased look at 15 MDR players in the US market, evaluating each on capabilities. We credit this recognition to customers like you who provide the critical feedback and guidance to improve our service — thank you!

What's New in InsightIDR: Q3 2021 in Review

Attack Surface Visibility, now in MDR Essentials

Our goal with Attack Surface Visibility — built exclusively for our MDR Essentials — is to help customers act proactively with a monthly snapshot of how exposed their attack surface looks to an opportunistic attacker. While this certainly is not a replacement for a true vulnerability management program, Attack Surface Visibility lets your team see obvious weak points that attackers may exploit and helps optimize your efforts with clear, prioritized actions to remediate risks and improve your security posture.

Stay tuned!

As always, we’re continuing to work on exciting product enhancements and releases throughout the year. Keep an eye on our blog and release notes as we continue to highlight the latest in detection and response at Rapid7.

NEVER MISS A BLOG

Get the latest stories, expertise, and news about security today.

SANS 2021 Threat Hunting Survey: How Organizations’ Security Postures Have Evolved in the New Normal

Post Syndicated from Margaret Wei original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/09/17/sans-2021-threat-hunting-survey-how-organizations-security-postures-have-evolved-in-the-new-normal/

SANS 2021 Threat Hunting Survey: How Organizations' Security Postures Have Evolved in the New Normal

It’s that time of year once again: The SANS Institute — the most trusted resource for cybersecurity research — has conducted its sixth annual Threat Hunting Survey, sponsored by Rapid7. The goal of this survey is to better understand the current threat hunting landscape and the benefits provided to an organization’s security posture as a result of threat hunting.

This year’s survey, “A SANS 2021 Survey: Threat Hunting in Uncertain Times,” has a unique focus, one that’s taken into consideration the impact of COVID-19 and how it’s affected organizations’ threat hunting. The findings indicate that the global pandemic has had a relatively mixed impact on the organizations surveyed, with many respondents unsure of what type of impact it’s had — and will have — on their threat hunting efforts.

Here’s a preview of the survey’s findings and its takeaways for organizations navigating today’s cybersecurity landscape.

Fewer organizations are performing threat hunting in 2021

According to the survey results, 12.6% fewer organizations are performing threat hunting in 2021 when compared to those surveyed in 2020. This is concerning, as threat hunting is an ever-evolving field, and organizations that don’t dedicate resources to it won’t be able to keep pace with the changes in tactics and techniques needed to find threat actors.

But what caused this dip? It seems to be a combination of organizations reducing their external spend with third parties and their overall internal staff in response to COVID-19. That said, this reduction cannot be fully accounted for by the pandemic.

Despite this decrease, there is good news: 93.1% of respondents indicated they have dedicated threat hunting staff, and the majority of respondents plan to increase spending on staffing and tools for threat hunting in the near future. Over the year to come, we’ll likely see an extended detection and response (XDR) approach leveraging tools like InsightIDR playing a key role in these efforts.

The threat hunting toolbox is evolving

The tools organizations are using to conduct threat hunting are evolving — but have they advanced enough to keep up with the modern cybersecurity landscape?

The output of threat hunting depends on three factors: visibility, skills, and threat intelligence. To achieve this output, threat hunters need the right tools. After asking respondents about their organizations’ tool chests, SANS found that over 75% of respondents are using a tool set that includes EDRs, SIEMs, and IDS/IPS.

It should come as no surprise that these tools are at the top — these are essential to establishing visibility. What is interesting, however, is the second-place spot taken by customizable tools, followed by threat intelligence platforms. This indicates there’s room for improvement for solutions vendors regarding threat hunting — and users are looking for deep insights. Tools like Rapid7’s cloud SIEM solution that cut through the noise and surface the threats that really matter are key in today’s complex IT environments.

Overall security posture has improved — but there’s room to grow

The improvements seen in organizations’ overall security posture as a result of threat hunting continue to show steady numbers. According to the study, organizations have seen anywhere from a 10-25% improvement in their security posture from threat hunting over the last year. In addition, 72.3% of respondents claimed threat hunting had a positive improvement on their organization over time.

These are brilliant results to see, and they reinforce the positive impact threat hunting can have, even in the face of today’s extraordinary challenges.

That said, while there are clear benefits to threat hunting, there are some barriers to success for organizations, namely:

  • Over half (51.3%) of all respondents indicated the primary barrier for them as threat hunters is a lack of skilled staff and training.
  • This was closely followed (43%) by an even split of challenges between the limitations of tools or technologies and a lack of defined processes.

Organizations can start addressing these challenges in a variety of ways, including adopting best-in-class detection and response tooling and owning documentation, education, and maintenance at scale. These are manageable barriers that will come down with time, and despite a global pandemic, the overall outlook is good, as the general trend to more threat hunting appears to sustain with this year’s survey.

Hopefully, these numbers continue to increase next year, and more organizations will reap the benefits of threat hunting.

To take a deeper dive into the survey’s findings, download the full report: A SANS 2021 Survey: Threat Hunting in Uncertain Times.

Learn more about how Rapid7’s Incident Detection and Response solutions can help you protect your organization and boost your ability to swiftly thwart attackers.