Tag Archives: XDR

Rapid7 Delivers Visibility Across All 19 Steps of Attack in 2023 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations: Enterprise

Post Syndicated from Meaghan Buchanan original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/09/20/rapid7-delivers-visibility-across-all-19-steps-of-attack-in-2023-mitre-engenuity/

Rapid7 Delivers Visibility Across All 19 Steps of Attack in 2023 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluations: Enterprise

Over seven years ago, we set out to change the way that SOCs approach threat detection and response. With the introduction of InsightIDR, we wanted to address the false positives and snowballing complexity that was burning out analysts, deteriorating security posture, and inhibiting necessary scale. We wanted to deliver a more intuitive and pragmatic approach, providing the most comprehensive coverage, with the strongest signal-to-noise. Today, as the robust XDR platform at the core of our leading MDR offering, InsightIDR has evolved to stay in front of emergent threats and expanding attack surfaces, while maintaining our commitment to eliminating the complexity and noise that distract and stall successful security teams.

Now we are proud to share our participation and results from the most recent MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: Enterprise, which highlights our ability to recognize advanced persistent threats early and across the kill chain, while maintaining disciplined signal-to-noise ratio to drive successful, real-world threat detection and response. You can find the detailed results and information about this evaluation on the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: Enterprise website.  

What You Need to Know

There is a lot of information to parse through in these results, so here we’ve broken down the key takeaways when it comes to this evaluation.

What is MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations?

First, a quick primer: The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a catalog and reference point for cyberattack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The framework provides security and risk teams with a common vernacular and guide to visualize detection coverage and map out plans to strengthen defenses. MITRE Engenuity’s ATT&CK Evaluations are a vehicle for the community to understand how technologies can help defend against known adversary behaviors. In this most recent Enterprise evaluation, the focus was on emulating Turla – a sophisticated Russia-based threat group known for their targeted intrusions and innovative stealth.

Rapid7 Delivers Complete Kill Chain Coverage

InsightIDR was able to capture relevant telemetry and detections across all 19 phases of this attack, demonstrating the ability to catch the earliest threat indicators and consistently identifying evasive behaviors as the attack progressed. This year’s attack was particularly complex, evaluating a diverse range of detections and leveraging multiple forms of endpoint telemetry. While not all techniques leave remnants for incident responders to analyze, the majority leave traces – if you have the right tools to help you look for them.

To address the need for deeper visibility to identify these traces of stealthy attacker behavior – like those emulated in this evaluation – Rapid7 has leveraged Velociraptor. In addition to providing one of the premier DFIR tools to support this kind of analysis, Velociraptor also enables real-time detection that sends alerts directly into the existing InsightIDR investigation experience so analysts do not need to pivot. This is one of the emerging capabilities of Velociraptor that the vibrant open source community continues to help strengthen day in and day out. The version of Velociraptor used in this evaluation is embedded into our existing Insight Agent and is hosted by Rapid7, which benefits from all of the open source generated artifacts and crowdsourced insights of the rapidly developed community feature set.

Strongest Signal-to-Noise for Real World Efficiency

Most importantly, we approached the evaluation with the intention of showing exactly what the experience would be for an InsightIDR customer today; no messing with our Insight Agent configurations or creating new, unrealistic exceptions just for this evaluation. What you see is what you get. And consistently, when we talk to customers, they aren’t looking for technology that fires alerts on every nuanced technique or procedure. They want to know that when something bad happens they’ll be able to pinpoint the threat as early as possible, quickly understand the scope of the attack, and know what to do about it. That’s our focus, and we are thrilled to showcase it with this evaluation.

Looking Ahead: Layered Defenses to Supercharge our Agent for Future-Ready SecOps

While IT environments continue to grow in diversity and surface area, endpoint fleets remain a critical security focus as they become increasingly distributed and remain rich sources of data and proprietary information. Endpoint detections, like those showcased in this evaluation, are one important piece of the puzzle, but successful security programs must encompass layered endpoint defenses – alongside broader ecosystem coverage.

We continue to invest to provide these layered defenses with our single, lightweight Insight Agent. From expanded pre-execution prevention and proactive risk mitigation, to high-efficacy detection of known and unknown threats, to detailed investigations, forensics, response, and automated playbooks, customers trust our Insight Agent as the nucleus of their complete endpoint security. With layered defenses across cloud, network, applications, and users, we’re also ready when attacks inevitably extend beyond the endpoint.

We are grateful once again to MITRE Engenuity for the opportunity to participate in their evaluation and for their shared commitment to open intelligence sharing and transparency. If you’re looking for a transparent partner to help you kick the complexity out of your SOC and proactively stop threats across the attack surface, we would love the opportunity to help you. Learn more about how we are driving real-world security success for customers like you.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of Rapid7 and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.

Dated, Vulnerable, Insecure Tech Is All Over the News. Hooray.

Post Syndicated from Amy Hunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/01/13/dated-vulnerable-insecure-tech-is-all-over-the-news-hooray/

Dated, Vulnerable, Insecure Tech Is All Over the News. Hooray.

Save the links. Pass them around. And consider getting your copy of the new 2023 XDR Buyer’s Guide—because if this isn’t a time for reckoning and progress, what is?

The news: on Wednesday, the United States grounded all flights coast-to-coast for the first time since 9/11. The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM) failed, leaving pilots without vital information they need to fly.

Separate from air traffic control systems, NOTAM ingests data from over 19,000 U.S. airports big and small. It then alerts specific pilots about specific anomalies to expect during 45,000 flights every day: the very latest runway closures, airspace restrictions, disruption of navigational signals, birds that can threaten a plane’s engines, anything.

Apparently, a corrupted file in the software was to blame for the system failure. This, from NBC News:

“…a government official said a corrupted file that affected both the primary and the backup NOTAM systems appeared to be the culprit. Investigators are working to determine if human error or malice is to blame for taking down the system, which eight contract employees had access to. At least one, perhaps two, of those contractors made the edit that corrupted the system, two government sources said Thursday.”

It will likely be a while before we know exactly what happened. But security practitioners might consider jumping to one conclusion today: your argument for investing in a detection and response solution which will provide visibility across your modern environment just got better. It’s important to have the right tools and systems in place, in all areas of your business from infrastructure to security, in order to have business continuity. Even with initiatives like legacy modernization, security teams need to have a view of their threat landscape as it expands.

Is anyone more responsible for business continuity than you?

Recently, CISOs have been named as defendants in several shareholder, civil, and criminal actions.  At the same time, CISOs are feeling less and less “personal responsibility” for security events, dropping from 71% to 57% in just one year. Security teams are spending more than half their time manually producing reports, pulling in data from multiple siloed tools. And silos present unacceptable risk. Something has to give.

While capabilities can vary across XDR vendors, the promise is to integrate and correlate data from numerous security tools — and from across varying environments — so you can see, prioritize, and eliminate threats, and move on quickly. The vendor evaluation process isn’t easy. But XDR is well worth it.

The 2023 XDR Buyer’s Guide includes:

  • Must-have requirements any real XDR offers
  • How XDR can be a staffing and efficiency game-changer
  • Key questions to ask as you evaluate options

The hidden lesson in the NOTAM outage? Less is more.

Patrick Kiley, Principal Security Consultant and Research Lead at Rapid7 has a long transportation background. He said that when organizations need to migrate off dated systems, it tends to be a “forklift upgrade, which typically requires significant resources.” That could include development, testing, cloud computing or hardware investment, and of course skilled cybersecurity personnel—who are in short supply these days.

“This kind of migration is a bear,” Kiley said, “so organizations tend to put them off.”

What’s not a bear?  Getting your copy of the 2023 XDR Buyer’s Guide.

Ditch The Duct Tape: Reduce Security Sprawl With XDR

Post Syndicated from Amy Hunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/01/11/ditch-the-duct-tape-reduce-security-sprawl-with-xdr/

Ditch The Duct Tape: Reduce Security Sprawl With XDR

The New Year’s Day edition of The Wall Street Journal asked a big question in a big headline: “Can Southwest Airlines Buy Back Its Customers’ Love?”

While other airlines rebounded from extreme winter weather and service disruptions, Southwest—always top-rated, with a famously loyal following—melted down. It canceled more than 2,300 flights, stranding passengers and their baggage around the country over the Christmas holidays. The U.S. Department of Transportation is putting the entire event “under a microscope.”

Most believe Southwest will, in fact, be loved again. Tickets were refunded, travel expenses were reimbursed, and approximately 25,000 frequent flyer miles were doled out to each stranded customer. Whatever. That’s not why you should pay attention to this tale.

The object lesson that matters? WSJ’s CIO Journal followed up, reporting that “balky crew scheduling technology” caused the disaster. Airline staff who used the system had been frustrated by it for some time, but couldn’t get executive attention. A scathing New York Times op-ed on December 31, “The Shameful Open Secret Behind Southwest’s Failure,” blames the strong incentives to address problems by “adding a bit of duct tape and wire to what you already have.”

Balky tech that frustrates staff: Sound familiar?

Two years ago, ZDNet reported the average enterprise managed 45 different tools to secure their environment. A few weeks ago, the Silicon Valley Business Journal said the number has jumped to 76, with sprawl driven by a need to keep pace with cloud adoption and remote work. Security teams are spending more than half their time manually producing reports, and pulling in data from multiple siloed tools.

The cybersecurity skills gap isn’t going anywhere. And the most tech savvy generation in human history—Gen Z, the latest entrants to adulthood and the workforce—is unlikely to stick it out in a burnout job laden with clunky tools. They grew up with customer-obsessed brands like Apple and Amazon and Zappos. Expectations about technology and elegant simplicity are built into all corners of their lives—work included— and they instantly know the difference between good and shambolic. Younger workers led The Great Resignation of 2021.

The trend toward XDR adoption is part of a solution. While capabilities can vary, XDR should integrate and correlate data from across your environment, letting you prioritize and eliminate threats, automate repetitive tasks, and liberate people to do important work.

If 2023 is your year to consider XDR, start with this Buyer’s Guide

Our new XDR Buyer’s Guide is for all of you who want to consolidate, simplify, and attract top talent. In this guide, you’ll get:

  • Must-have requirements any real XDR offers
  • Ways XDR is a staffing and efficiency game-changer
  • Key questions to ask as you evaluate options

Last year, Southwest announced $2 billion in customer experience investments, including upgraded WiFi, in-seat power, and larger overhead bins, as well as a new multimedia brand campaign, “Go With Heart.”  

After taking very good care of stranded customers—and true  to form, the airline did—it announced a 10-year, $10 million plan to hit carbon reduction goals. The Wall Street Journal asked: “Could not the Southwest IT department have used another $10 million?”

…and you’ve surely heard about this

This morning at 7:20am, the FAA grounded all domestic departures when the NOTAM (Notice to Air Mission) system failed. This critical system ingests information about anomalies at 19,000 airports for 45,000 flights every day, and alerts the right pilots at the right time. We woke up hearing about “failure to modernize” and also possible compromise.

Thanks for reading and come back tomorrow, as we’ll be following this developing story closely.

Webinar: 2023 Cybersecurity Industry Predictions

Post Syndicated from Tom Caiazza original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/12/08/webinar-2023-cybersecurity-industry-predictions/

Webinar: 2023 Cybersecurity Industry Predictions

With 2022 rapidly coming to a close, this is the time of year where it makes sense to take a step back and look at the year in cybersecurity, and make a few critical predictions for what the industry could face in the year ahead.

In order to give the security community some insight into where we’ve been and where we are going, Rapid7 has put together a webinar featuring some of Rapid7’s leading thinkers on the subject — and an important voice from a valued customer — to discuss some of the lessons learned and give their take on what 2023 will look like.

Featured in the webinar are Jason Hart, Rapid7’s Chief Technology Officer for EMEA; Simon Goldsmith, InfoSec Director at OVO Energy, the United Kingdom’s third largest energy retailer; Raj Samani, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at Rapid7; and Rapid7’s Vice President of Sales for APAC, Rob Dooley.

2022 – “A Challenging Year”

It may seem like the pace of critical vulnerabilities has only increased in 2022, and to our panel, it feels that way because it has. Whereas in years past, the cybersecurity industry would deal with a major vulnerability once a quarter or so (Heartbleed came to mind for some on our panel), this year it seemed like those vulnerabilities were coming to the fore nearly every week. Many of those vulnerabilities appeared to be actively exploited, raising the urgency for security teams to address them as quickly as possible.

This puts the onus on security teams to not only sift through the noise to find the signal (a spot where automation can be key), it also requires expert analysis all at a pace that the industry really hasn’t seen before.

For some, the fast pace of these vulnerabilities were an opportunity to test the mettle of their security operations. Even if their organizations weren’t a victim of those attacks, they can serve as “a lesson learned” putting their incident response plans through their paces. This gives them the confidence to perform well during an actual attack and evangelizes the need for strong vulnerability management across their entire organization, not just within their security teams.

Prediction 1: Information Sharing and the Ever-Expanding Attack Landscape

To give some context for this first prediction, it is important to express that zero-day attacks are on the rise, the time to exploitation is getting shorter, and the social media giants — often a critical component of security community vulnerability information sharing — are becoming less and less reliable.

But the desire for the community to publish and share information about vulnerabilities is still strong. This form of asymmetry between threat actors and the security community has long existed and there is still the inherent risk of transparency on one side benefiting those who seek opacity on the other. Information sharing between the community will be as critical as ever, especially as the reliable avenues for sharing that information dwindle in the coming months.

The way to combat this is by operationalizing cybersecurity — moving away from the binary approach of “patch or don’t patch” — and instead incorporating stronger context through a better understanding of past attack trends in order to prioritize actions and cover your organization from the actual risks.

Another key component is instituting better security hygiene across the organization. What Simon Goldsmith called “controlling the controllables.” This also includes tech stack modernization and the other infrastructural improvements organizations can take to put them in a better position to repel and ultimately respond to an ever more present threat across their networks.

Prediction 2: Cybersecurity Budgets and the Security Talent Shortage

At the same time that threat actors are making it harder on security teams across nearly every industry, the stakes are getting higher for those that are caught up in a breach. Governments are levying hefty fines for organizations that suffer data breaches and there is a real shortage of well-rounded security talent in the newest generation of security professionals.

In some cases this is due to an increase in specialization, but to harken back to the previous prediction, there is some level of “controlling the controllables” at play wherein organizations need to better nurture security talent. There are perennial components to the talent churn and shortfalls (i.e., reduced budgets, a lack of buy-in across the organization, etc.). However, there are more ways in which organizations can bolster their security teams.  

Focusing on diversity and inclusion within your security team is one way to improve not only the morale of your security team, but the efficacy that comes from having wide-ranging viewpoints and expertise present on a team all working together.

Another way to strengthen your team is to help them get out of the cybersecurity bubble. Finding ways to work across teams will not only increase the amount of expertise thrown at a particular problem, but will open avenues for innovation that may not have been considered by a completely siloed infosec team. This means opening up communication with engineering or development teams, and often bringing in a managed services partner to help boost the number of smart voices singing together.

Finally, move beyond the search for the mythical unicorn and acknowledge that experience and expertise count just as much or more than having the right certifications on paper. This should mean fostering career development for more junior team members, engaging current teammates in ways that make the work they do more of a passion and less of a grind, and also ensuring that your team’s culture is an asset working to bring everyone together.

Prediction 3: Operationalizing Security

The gap between technical stakeholders and the business leaders within organizations is getting wider, and will continue to do so, if changes aren’t made to the ways in which the two sides of the house understand each other.

Part of this disconnect comes from the question of “whether or not we’re safe.” In cybersecurity, there are no absolutes; despite compliance with all best practices, there will always be some level of risk. And security operations can often fall into the trap of asking for more funding to better identify more risk, identifying that risk, and then asking for more money to address it. This is not a sustainable approach to closing the understanding gap.

Stakeholders outside of the SOC should understand the ways in which security teams reduce risk through clear metrics and KPIs that demonstrate just how much improvement is being made in infosec, thus justifying the investment. This operationalization of security — the demonstration of improvements — is critical.

Another component of this disconnect lies in which parts of the organization are responsible for different security actions and ensuring they are working together clearly, cohesively, and most importantly, predictably. Protection Level Agreements can go a long way in ensuring that vulnerabilities are handled within a certain amount of time. This requires security teams to provide the relevant information about the vulnerability and how to remediate it to other stakeholders within a predictable window after the vulnerability is identified, so that team can take the steps necessary to remediate it.

Conclusion: Uniting Cybersecurity

It may seem that this blog post (and its sister webinar) offer up doom, gloom, and tons of FUD. And while that’s not entirely untrue, there is a silver lining. The commonality between all three of these predictions is the concept of uniting cybersecurity. Security is integrated within every component of an organization and each group should understand what goals the security operation is striving for, how they will get there, how they themselves are accountable for moving that goal forward, and how that success will ultimately be measured. The cybersecurity community has an opportunity, and maybe even a mandate, to help bring these changes to their organizations as it will be one of the most critical components of a safer, cybersecurity operation.  

All of these points (and so many more) are eloquently made on the webinar available here.

Search Made Easy: InsightIDR’s Secret Weapon for Efficiency and Efficacy

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/11/22/search-made-easy-insightidrs-secret-weapon-for-efficiency-and-efficacy/

Search Made Easy: InsightIDR’s Secret Weapon for Efficiency and Efficacy

By Matt Heidet

Matt is a Senior Information Security Engineer at a Regional Financial Institution. He is a Customer and Guest Blogger for Rapid7

Have you ever groaned when divvying up incidents from a pen-test amongst an overworked team? Or maybe you’ve struggled to present how you adhere to multiple compliance frameworks to your board. As a Senior Information Security Engineer at a Regional Finance Institute, I’m all too familiar with the daily grind – too many threats, not nearly enough time. Fortunately, Rapid7’s InsightIDR has helped me and my team unify our data, verify the nature of threats, and uphold a security posture that we’re confident in.

InsightIDR has lots of features that have enabled my organization to identify and respond more easily to threats. In this blog post, I’m going to share some insight into my favorite – InsightIDR’s Log Search function.

Back to the Beginning: Why We Chose Rapid7

Choosing InsightIDR was a no-brainer for us. We tried two other products, but as soon as we finished the proof-of-concept with Rapid7, we went straight to purchase. There was no point in even testing the others, as InsightIDR provided us with the visibility and context necessary to keep our environment secure

If you already have InsightVM, Rapid7’s vulnerability management solution, it’s a pretty smooth transition to InsightIDR. As existing InsightVM users, we already had the Rapid7 Insight Agent deployed on our endpoints, which provided us with real-time endpoint monitoring for vulnerabilities. When we added InsightIDR to our environment, we were automatically covered on those same endpoints, without any need to set up anything additional.

We were able to get up and running and integrate with a number of Azure Event Hubs out of the gate (a centralized service from which to collect Azure data and logs). Only a few other tools would provide that same capability – but they wouldn’t fit into our existing environment the way that Rapid7 did.

When we first started using InsightIDR, my team wanted to bring in as much data to InsightIDR as we could to get a clear picture of what was happening in our environment. We knew we needed holistic visibility, but weren’t 100% on what we should be alerting on or necessarily looking for. Luckily, InsightIDR’s Log Search intuitively organized all of our data and helped us get a view of everything in one place, narrowing our focus and enabling us to really focus on high priority data.

InsightIDR removed the complexity of traditional Log Search. If you’re not sure where to start, just start with a simple search – a host name, a kind of attack, or an event. Then, based on your results, you can create a more advanced search by filtering, iterating, or narrowing down your simple searches. From there, you can start creating reports. Your reports can tell you (and you can then customize) how you should be watching an endpoint, how you should be alerted, and more.

Let’s Talk Outcomes

Now it’s time to do something with all this data! We were able to compare data from those sources to the email alerts that we got from Microsoft on Azure and easily generate a report based on the email events we were seeing from Microsoft. From there, we were able to generate custom detections.

One reason this was all so straightforward is that Rapid7’s powerful search language, Log Entry Query Language (LEQL – which allows you to construct queries that can extract the hidden insights within your logs), is easy to pick up. Even if you’re not a programmer or engineer, the structure and syntax of the language are accessible.

Once you get the first couple workflows ironed out, it’s easy to extrapolate to other ones. Once my team focused on this task we were able to come up with 45 custom detections over just three days!

Where Do I Go From Here?

Detections are your bread and butter, of course. But once you’re oriented to the dashboard, the language, and the basics of a workflow, the sky’s the limit. You can then customize your reports to your heart’s desire. My team currently has about 22 reports coming in daily, summarizing almost 100 custom detections that all stem from log search.

Rapid7’s alerting and reporting is hands down the best I’ve ever worked with. But it’s not just about volume – it’s also about versatility. We’re able to monitor all of our Cloud services – including Amazon, Azure, and Google – with ease. In the past, when using managed security providers, this wasn’t nearly as straightforward. We’re looking at InsightIDR’s pre-built Attacker Behavior Analytics (ABA) and User Behavior Analytics (UBA) detections with regularity, using a mix of both custom and pre-built “cards” (a visually appealing representation of data) in our InsightIDR dashboard.

Furthermore, it’s not just that you have options. The pre-built detections that InsightIDR ships out of the box boasts plenty of efficacy, resulting in unprecedented efficiency. The ability to have all of the data you need in one place – the equivalent of a “single pane of glass” – just can’t be overstated.

Prioritizing XDR in 2023: Stronger Detection and Response With Less Complexity

Post Syndicated from KJ McCann original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/09/21/prioritizing-xdr-in-2023-stronger-detection-and-response-with-less-complexity/

Prioritizing XDR in 2023: Stronger Detection and Response With Less Complexity

As we get closer to closing out 2022, the talk in the market continues to swirl around extended detection and response (XDR) solutions. What are they? What are the benefits? Should my team adopt XDR, and if yes, how do we evaluate vendors to determine the best approach?

While there continue to be many different definitions of XDR in the market, the common themes around this technology consistently are:

  • Tightly integrated security products delivering common threat prevention, detection, and incident response capabilities
  • Out-of-the-box operational efficiencies that require minimal customization
  • Security orchestration and automation functions to streamline repetitive processes and accelerate response
  • High-quality detection content with limited tuning required
  • Advanced analytics that can correlate alerts from multiple sources into incidents

Simply put, XDR is an evolution of the security ecosystem in order to provide elevated and stronger security for resource-constrained security teams.

XDR for 2023

Why is XDR the preferred cybersecurity solution? With an ever-expanding attack surface and diverse and complex threats, security operations centers (SOCs) need more visibility and stronger threat coverage across their environment – without creating additional pockets of siloed data from point solutions.

A 2022 study of security leaders found that the average security team is now managing 76 different tools – with sprawl driven by a need to keep pace with cloud adoption and remote working requirements. Because of the exponential growth of tools, security teams are spending more than half their time manually producing reports, pulling in data from multiple siloed tools. An XDR solution offers significant operational efficiency benefits by centralizing all that data to form a cohesive picture of your environment.

Is XDR the right move for your organization?

When planning your security for the next year, consider what outcomes you want to achieve in 2023.

Security product and vendor consolidation

To combat increasing complexity, security and risk leaders are looking for effective ways to consolidate their security stack – without compromising the ability to detect threats across a growing attack surface. In fact, 75% of security professionals are pursuing a vendor consolidation strategy today, up from just 29% two years ago. An XDR approach can be an effective path for minimizing the number of tools your SOC needs to manage while still bringing together critical telemetry to power detection and response. For this reason, many teams are prioritizing XDR in 2023 to spearhead their consolidation movement. It’s predicted that by year-end 2027, XDR will be used by up to 40% of end-user organizations to reduce the number of security vendors they have in place.

As you explore prioritizing XDR in 2023, it’s important to remember that all XDR is not created equal. A hybrid XDR approach may enable you to select top products across categories but will still require significant deployment, configuration, and ongoing management to bring these products together (not to mention multiple vendor relationships and expenses to tackle). A native XDR approach delivers a more inclusive suite of capabilities from a single vendor. For resource-constrained teams, a native approach may be superior to hybrid as there is likely to be less work on behalf of the customer. A native XDR does much of the consolidation work for you, while a hybrid XDR helps you consolidate.

Improved security operations efficiency and productivity

“Efficiency” is a big promise of XDR, but this can look different for many teams. How do you measure efficiency today? What areas are currently inefficient and could be made faster or easier? Understanding this baseline and where your team is losing time today will help you know what to prioritize when you pursue an XDR strategy in 2023.

A strong XDR replaces existing tools and processes with alternative, more efficient working methods. Example processes to evaluate as you explore XDR:

  • Data ingestion: As your organization grows, you want to be sure your XDR can grow with it. Cloud-native XDR platforms will be especially strong in this category, as they will have the elastic foundation necessary to keep pace with your environment. Consider also how you’ll add new event sources over time. This can be a critical area to improve efficiency.
  • Dashboards and reporting: Is your team equipped to create and manage custom queries, reports, and dashboards? Creating and distributing reports can be extremely time-consuming – especially for newer analysts. If your team doesn’t have the time for constant dashboard creation, consider XDR approaches that offer prebuilt content and more intuitive experiences that will satisfy these use cases.
  • Detections: With a constant evolution of threat actors and behaviors, it’s important to evaluate if your team has the time to bring together the necessary threat intelligence and detection rule creation to stay ahead of emergent threats. Effective XDR can greatly reduce or potentially eliminate the need for your team to manually create and manage detection rules by offering built-in detection libraries. It’s important to understand the breadth and fidelity of the detections library offered by your vendor and ensure that this content addresses the needs of your organization.
  • Automation: Finding the right balance for your SOC between technology and human expertise will allow analysts to apply their skills and training in critical areas without having to maintain repetitive and mundane tasks additionally. Because different XDR solutions offer different instances of automation, prioritize workflows that will provide the most benefit to your team. Some example use cases would be connecting processes across your IT and security teams, automating incident response to common threats, or reducing any manual or repetitive tasks.

Accelerated investigations and response

While XDR solutions claim to host a variety of features that can accelerate your investigation and response process, it’s important to understand how your team currently functions. Start by identifying your mean time to respond (MTTR) at present, then what your goal MTTR is for the future. Once you lay that out, look back at how analysts currently investigate and respond to attacks and note any skill or knowledge gaps, so you can understand what capabilities will best assist your team. XDR aims to paint a fuller picture of attacker behavior, so security teams can better analyze and respond to it.

Some examples of questions that can build out the use cases you require to meet your target ROI for next year.

  • During an investigation, where is your team spending the majority of their time?
  • What established processes are currently in place for threat response?
  • How adaptable is your team when faced with new and unknown threat techniques?
  • Do you have established playbooks for specific threats? Does your team know what to do when these fire?

Again, having a baseline of where your organization is today will help you define more realistic goals and requirements going forward. When evaluating XDR products, dig into how they will shorten the window for attackers to succeed and drive a more effective response for your team. For a resource-constrained team, you may especially want to consider how an XDR approach can:

  • Reduce the amount of noise that your team needs to triage and ensure analysts zero in on top priority threats
  • Shorten the time for effective investigation by providing relevant events, evidence, and intelligence around a specific attack
  • Provide effective playbooks that maximize autonomy for analysts, enabling them to respond to threats confidently without the need to escalate or do excessive investigation
  • Deliver one-click automation that analysts can leverage to accelerate a response after they have accessed the situation

Unlock the potential of XDR with Rapid7

If you and your team prioritize XDR in 2023, we’d love to help. Rapid7’s native XDR approach unlocks advanced threat detection and accelerated response for resource-constrained teams. With 360-degree attack surface coverage, teams have a sophisticated view across both the internal – and external – threat landscape. Rapid7 Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering curate an always up-to-date library of threat detections – vetted in the field by our MDR SOC experts to ensure high-fidelity, actionable alerts. And with recommended response playbooks and pre-built workflows, your team will always be ready to respond to threats quickly and confidently.

To learn more about the current market for XDR and receive additional perspectives, check out Gartner’s Market Guide for Extended Detection and Response.

Additional reading:

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Rapid7 Makes Security Compliance Complexity a Thing of the Past With InsightIDR

Post Syndicated from KJ McCann original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/08/30/rapid7-makes-security-compliance-complexity-a-thing-of-the-past-with-insightidr/

Rapid7 Makes Security Compliance Complexity a Thing of the Past With InsightIDR

As a unified SIEM and XDR solution, InsightIDR gives organizations the tools they need to drive an elevated and efficient compliance program.

Cybersecurity standards and compliance are mission-critical for every organization, regardless of size. Apart from the direct losses resulting from a data breach, non-compliant companies could face hefty fees, loss of business, and even jail time under growing regulations. However, managing and maintaining compliance, preparing for audits, and building necessary reports can be a full-time job, which might not be in the budget. For already-lean teams, compliance can also distract from more critical security priorities like monitoring threats, early threat detection, and accelerated response – exposing organizations to greater risk.

An efficient compliance strategy reduces risk, ensures that your team is always audit-ready, and – most importantly – drives focus on more critical security work. With InsightIDR, security practitioners can quickly meet their compliance and regulatory requirements while accelerating their overall detection and response program.

Here are three ways InsightIDR has been built to elevate and simplify your compliance processes.

1. Powerful log management capabilities for full environment visibility and compliance readiness

Complete environment visibility and security log collection are critical for compliance purposes, as well as for providing a foundation of effective monitoring and threat detection. Enterprises need to monitor user activity, behavior, and application access across their entire environment — from the cloud to on-premises services. The adoption of cloud services continues to increase, creating even more potential access points for teams to keep up with.

InsightIDR’s strong log management capabilities provide full visibility into these potential threats, as well as enable robust compliance reporting by:

  • Centralizing and aggregating all security-relevant events, making them available for use in monitoring, alerting, investigation, ad hoc searching
  • Providing the ability to search for data quickly, create data models and pivots, save searches and pivots as reports, configure alerts, and create dashboards
  • Retaining all log data for 13 months for all InsightIDR customers, enabling the correlation of data over time and meeting compliance mandates.
  • Automatically mapping data to compliance controls, allowing analysts to create comprehensive dashboards and reports with just a few clicks

To take it a step further, InsightIDR’s intuitive user interface streamlines searches while eliminating the need for IT administrators to master a search language. The out-of-the-box correlation searches can be invoked in real time or scheduled to run regularly at a specific time should the need arise for compliance audits and reporting, updated dashboards, and more.

2. Predefined compliance reports and dashboards to keep you organized and consistent

Pre-built compliance content in InsightIDR enables teams to create robust reports without investing countless hours manually building and correlating data to provide information on the organization’s compliance posture. With the pre-built reports and dashboards, you can:

  • Automatically map data to compliance controls
  • Save filters and searches, then duplicate them across dashboards
  • Create, share, and customize reports right from the dashboard
  • Make reports available in multiple formats like PDF or interactive HTML files

InsightIDR’s library of pre-built dashboards makes it easier than ever to visualize your data within the context of common frameworks. Entire dashboards created by our Rapid7 experts can be set up in just a few clicks. Our dashboards cover a variety of key compliance frameworks like PCI, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more.

Rapid7 Makes Security Compliance Complexity a Thing of the Past With InsightIDR

3. Unified and correlated data points to provide meaningful insights

With strong log management capabilities providing a foundation for your security posture, the ability to correlate the resulting data and look for unusual behavior, system anomalies, and other indicators of a security incident is key. This information is used not only for real-time event notification but also for compliance audits and reporting, performance dashboards, historical trend analysis, and post-hoc incident forensics.

Privileged users are often the targets of attacks, and when compromised, they typically do the most damage. That’s why it’s critical to extend monitoring to these users. In fact, because of the risk involved, privileged user monitoring is a common requirement for compliance reporting in many regulated industries.

InsightIDR provides a constantly curated library of detections that span user behavior analytics, endpoints, file integrity monitoring, network traffic analysis, and cloud threat detection and response – supported by our own native endpoint agent, network sensor, and collection software. User authentications, locational data, and asset activity are baselined to identify anomalous privilege escalations, lateral movement, and compromised credentials. Customers can also connect their existing Privileged Access Management tools (like CyberArk Vault or Varonis DatAdvantage) to get a more unified view of privileged user monitoring with a single interface.

Meet compliance standards while accelerating your detection and response

We know compliance is not the only thing a security operations center (SOC) has to worry about. InsightIDR can ensure that your most critical compliance requirements are met quickly and confidently. Once you have an efficient compliance process, the team will be able to focus their time and effort on staying ahead of emergent threats and remediating attacks quickly, reducing risk to the business.

What could you do with the time back?

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Cybersecurity Analysts: Job Stress Is Bad, but Boredom Is Kryptonite

Post Syndicated from Amy Hunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/08/24/cybersecurity-analysts-job-stress-is-bad-but-boredom-is-kryptonite/

Cybersecurity Analysts: Job Stress Is Bad, but Boredom Is Kryptonite

Years ago, “airline pilot” used to be a high-stress profession. Imagine being in personal control of equipment worth millions hurtling through the sky on an irregular schedule with the lives of all the passengers in your hands.

But today on any given flight, autopilot is engaged almost 90% of the time. (The FAA requires it on long-haul flights or anytime the aircraft is over 28,000 feet.) There are vast stretches of time where the problem isn’t stress – it’s highly trained, intelligent people just waiting to perhaps be needed if something goes wrong.

Of course, automation has made air travel much safer. But over-reliance on it is now considered an emerging risk for pilots. The concerns? Loss of situational awareness, and difficulty taking over quickly and deftly when something fails. FAA scientist Kathy Abbott believes automation has made pilot error more likely if they “abdicate too much responsibility to the automated systems.” This year, the FAA rewrote its guidance, now encouraging pilots to spend more time actually flying and keeping their skills sharp.

What you want at any job is “flow”

Repetitive tasks can be a big part of a cybersecurity analyst’s day. But when you combine monotony (which often leads to boredom) with the need for attentiveness, it’s kryptonite. One neuroscientific study proved chronic boredom affects “judgment, goal-directed planning, risk assessment, attention focus, distraction suppression, and intentional control over emotional responses.”

The goal is total and happy immersion in a task that challenges you but is within your abilities. When you have that, you’re “in the zone.” And you’re not even tempted to multi-task (which isn’t really a thing).

Combine InsightConnect and InsightIDR, and you can find yourself “in the zone” for incident response:

  • Response playbooks are automatically triggered from InsightIDR investigations and alerts.
  • Alerts are prioritized, and false alerts are wiped away.
  • Alerts and investigations are automatically enriched: no more manually checking IP’s, DNS names, hashes, etc.
  • Pathways to PagerDuty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, JIRA, and ServiceNow are already set up for you and tickets are created automatically for alerts.

According to Rapid7‘s Detection and Response Practice Advisor Jeffrey Gardner, the coolest example of InsightIDR’s automaticity is its baselining capability.

“Humans are built to notice patterns, but we can only process so much so quickly,” Gardner says. “Machine learning lets us take in infinitely more data than a human would ever be able to process and find interesting or anomalous activity that would otherwise be missed.” InsightIDR can look at user/system activity and immediately notify you when things appear awry.

The robots are not coming for your job – surely not yours. But humans and machines are already collaborating, and we need to be very thoughtful about exactly, precisely how.

Like inattentive commercial pilots, Tesla drivers using Autopilot don’t much look at the road even though they’re required to, and they remain wholly responsible for everything the vehicle does. Teslas are also being hacked, started, and driven off.  A 19-year-old took 25 Teslas. We’re designing our jobs – and life on earth, too.

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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.

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The Future of the SOC Is XDR

Post Syndicated from Dina Durutlic original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/08/03/the-future-of-the-soc-is-xdr/

The Future of the SOC Is XDR

Extended detection and response (XDR) is increasingly gaining traction across the industry. In a new research ebook sponsored by Rapid7, SOC Modernization and the Role of XDR, ESG identified that 61% of security professionals claim that they are very familiar with XDR technology. While this is an improvement from ESG’s 2020 research (when only 24% of security professionals were very familiar with XDR), 39% are still only somewhat familiar, not very familiar, or not at all familiar with XDR.

Security professionals are still unsure of all the associated capabilities that they can leverage with XDR, and frankly how to define the solution. ESG reports that 55% of respondents say that XDR is an extension of endpoint detection and response (EDR), while 44% believe XDR is a detection and response product from a single security technology vendor or an integrated and heterogeneous security product architecture designed to interoperate and coordinate on threat prevention, detection, and response. Nevertheless, XDR remains to be standardized in the industry.

Keeping up with threats

XDR, as defined by Rapid7, goes beyond simple data aggregation. It unifies and transforms relevant security data across a modern environment to detect real attacks. XDR provides security teams with high context and actionable insights to extinguish threats quickly. With XDR, organizations can operate efficiently, reduce noise, and help zero in on attacks early.

According to ESG, security professionals seem to have a number of common XDR use cases in mind. 26% of security professionals want XDR to help prioritize alerts based on risk, 26% seek improved detection of advanced threats, 25% want more efficient threat/forensic investigations, 25% desire a layered addition to existing threat detection tools, and 25% think XDR could improve threat detection to reinforce security controls and prevent future similar attacks.

The theme and core capabilities that are common align with filling in gaps within the security tech stack – while improving threat detection and response.

Holistic detection and response

More than half of security professionals, surveyed by ESG, believe XDR will supplement existing security operations technologies; 44% of those surveyed see XDR as consolidating current security operations technologies into a common platform.

Security operation center (SOC) analysts struggle with numerous disparate tools and systems. It often leads to having to sift through a lot of data (often noise) and context-switching (moving from one tool to another). XDR aims to:

  • Unify broad telemetry sources (e.g. users, endpoints, cloud, network, etc.) into a single view and set of detections. It helps analysts curate detections, comprehensive investigations, and much more ultimately enabling simpler, smarter, and faster executions.
  • Embed expertise to help guide incident response (e.g. recommendation actions and next steps, automations, etc.) to enable security professionals to respond to threats with a single click – or without resource involvement.
  • Empower security teams to be more proactive around detection and response by enabling hunting, guiding forensic and investigation use cases, and more automation to streamline SecOps.
  • Unlock greater efficiency and efficacy for security teams at each step of the detection and response journey (from initial deployment and data collection, to finding threats and incident response).

Regardless of how XDR is defined, security professionals are interested in using XDR to help them address several threat detection and response challenges. InsightIDR, Rapid7’s cloud-native SIEM and XDR, is an XDR solution before it was even “coined” and users are achieving XDR outcomes. XDR has improved security efficacy and efficiency, unified data, and helped streamline security operations.

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5 SOAR Myths Debunked

Post Syndicated from Matthew Gardiner original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/07/27/5-soar-myths-debunked/

5 SOAR Myths Debunked

A recently published ESG research ebook, sponsored by Rapid7, SOC Modernization and the Role of XDR, shows that organizations are increasingly leveraging security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) systems in an attempt to keep up with their security operations challenges. This makes sense, as every organization is facing the combined pressure of the growing threat landscape, expanding attack surface, and the cybersecurity skills shortage. To address these challenges, 88% of organizations report that they plan to increase their spending on security operations with the specific goal of better operationalizing threat intelligence, leveraging asset data in their SOC, improving their alert prioritization, and better measuring and improving their KPIs. All of these initiatives fall squarely into the purpose and value of SOAR.

In the same research, ESG also uncovered both praise and challenges for SOAR systems. On the praise side, there is very broad agreement that SOAR tools are effective for automating both complex and basic security operations tasks. But on the challenges side, the same respondents report unexpectedly high complexity and demands on programming and scripting skills that are getting in the way of SOAR-enabled value realization.

5 SOAR Myths Debunked

The SOC Modernization and the Role of XDR ebook, my years in the security industry, and my last year heavily focused on security operations and SOAR bring to mind five common SOAR myths worth debunking.

Myth #1: SOAR-enabled security automation is about eliminating security analysts

Security professionals, you can put away your wooden shoes (Sabot). There is no risk of job losses resulting from the use of SOAR tools. While in some cases, security tasks can be fully automated away, in the vast majority of SOAR-enabled automations, the value of SOAR is in teeing up the information necessary for security analysts to make good decisions and to leverage downstream integrations necessary to execute those decisions.

If you love manually collecting data from multiple internal and external sources necessary to make an informed decision and then manually opening tickets in IT service management systems or opening admin screens in various security controls to execute those decisions, stay away from using SOAR! Want to hear directly from an organization regarding this myth? Check out this Brooks case study and a supporting blog. The point of SOAR is to elevate your existing security professionals, not eliminate them.

Myth #2: SOAR requires programming skills

While SOARs require programming logic, they don’t generally require programming skills. If you know what process, data, decision points, and steps you need to get the job done, a SOAR system is designed to elevate the implementer of these processes out of the weeds of integrations and code-level logic steps necessary to get the job done.

The purpose of a well-designed SOAR is to elevate the security analyst out of the code and into the logic of their security operations. This is why a SOAR is not a general-purpose automation tool but is specifically designed and integrated to aid in the management and automation of tasks specific to security operations. Programming skills are not a prerequisite for getting value from a SOAR tool.

Myth #3: SOAR is only for incident response

While clearly the origin story of SOAR is closely connected to incident response (IR) and security operations centers (SOCs), it is a myth that SOARs are exclusively used to manage and automate IR-related processes. While responding effectively and quickly to incidents is critical, preparing your IT environment well through timely and efficient vulnerability management processes is equally important to the risk posture of the organization.

We see here at Rapid7 that just as many vulnerability management use cases are enabled with our SOAR product, InsightConnect, as are incident response ones. If you want to see some real life examples of incident response and vulnerability management use cases in action, check out these demos.

Myth #4: You must re-engineer your security processes before adopting SOAR

Some organizations get caught in a security catch-22. They are too busy with manual security tasks to apply automation to help reduce the time necessary to conduct these security tasks. This is a corollary to the problem of being too busy working to do any work. The beauty of SOAR solutions is that you don’t have to know exactly what your security processes need to be before using a SOAR. Fortunately, thousands of your peer organizations have been working on hundreds of these security processes for many years.

Why create from scratch when you can just borrow what has already been crowdsourced? Many SOAR users freely publish what they consider to be the best practice security process automations for the various security incidents and vulnerabilities that you will likely encounter. SOAR vendors, such as Rapid7, curate and host hundreds of pre-built automations that you can study and grab for free to apply (and customize as appropriate) to your organization. These crowdsourced libraries mean that you do not need to start your security automation projects with a blank sheet of paper.

Myth #5: SOAR tools are not needed if you use managed security service providers

There is no question that managed security service providers in general and managed detection and response (MDR) providers – such as Rapid7 – in particular can deliver critical security value to organizations. In fact, in the same ESG research, 88% of organizations reported that they would increase their use of managed services for security operations moving forward. The economic value of an MDR service like Rapid7’s was demonstrated in a newly published Forrester TEI report. But what happens to SOAR when you leverage an MDR provider?

The reality is that managed providers complement and extend your security teams and thus don’t fully replace them. While managed providers can and do automate aspects of your security operations – most typically detections and investigations – rarely are they given full reign to make changes in your IT and security systems or to drive responses directly into your organization. They provide well-vetted recommendations, and you, the staff security professionals, decide how and when best to implement those recommendations. This is where SOAR comes in, doing what it does best: helping you manage and automate the execution of those recommendations. In fact, debunking the myth, SOAR tools can directly complement and extend the value of managed security service providers.

Clearly, there is no shortage of things to do and improve in most organizations to bend the security curve in favor of the good guys. My hope is that this latest research from ESG and the SOAR myth-busting in this blog will help you and your organization bend the security curve in your favor.

Download the e-book today for more insights from ESG’s research.

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4 key statistics to build a business case for an MDR partner

Post Syndicated from Jake Godgart original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/07/21/4-key-statistics-to-build-a-business-case-for-an-mdr-partner/

4 key statistics to build a business case for an MDR partner

From one person to the next, the word “impact” may have wildly different connotations. Is the word being used in a positive or negative sense? For an understaffed security organization attempting to fend off attacks and plug vulnerabilities, the impact of all of that work is most likely negative: more work, less success to show for it, and more stress to take home.

That’s why Rapid7 commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a June 2022 Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to learn how our real MDR customers are seeing tangible impacts to their bottom line by partnering with Rapid7.

The study found that Rapid7’s SOC expertise – with XDR technology that generated improved visibility – enabled a composite organization using Rapid7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) to:

  • Quickly extend its coverage with skilled headcount
  • Put formal processes in place for cyberattack detection and response

The analysis was conducted using a hypothetical composite organization created for the purposes of the study, with insights gleaned from four real-life MDR customers. This composite reflects a profile we see often: a small team of two security analysts tasked with protecting 1,800 employees and 2,100 assets.

The study concluded that partnering with Rapid7 MDR services experts enabled the composite organization to achieve end-to-end coverage and cut down on detection and response times. Impact like that can open the door to true progress.

Any MDR financial justification like this will come down to four main factors: return on investment (ROI), savings from building out your SOC team, the reduction in risk to your organization, and the time to see value/impact. Let’s break down these four key statistics from the study in more detail.

1. ROI

In the Forrester study, the composite organization – once partnered with Rapid7 – saw productivity gains accelerate efficiencies across alert investigation, response actions, and report creation. They were also protected with 24/7 eyes-on-glass and expert security support. Savings from security-team productivity gains totaled over $930,000 and Rapid7 MDR services in total delivered an ROI of 549% for the composite organization over the course of the three-year analysis. That kind of money can be reinvested to strengthen other parts of a security program and act as a profit driver for the business.

This greater overall visibility is powered by XDR capabilities that can customize protection to assess and block specific threats. Continuously analyzing activity in this way enables more targeted and prioritized containment actions that lead to better curation.

2. Hiring savings

In any sort of managerial capacity, the word “headcount” can have an exhausting connotation. Having to hire a skilled professional, onboard that person to the point they’re contributing in a meaningful way, and then do it all again to fill out perhaps multiple vacancies in pursuit of a productive SOC team – it’s a lot. And it sucks up time and valuable resources, which is perhaps the biggest advantage attackers have over a security organization in need.  

Partnering with Rapid7 MDR afforded the composite organization:

  • Time savings for existing security team members
  • Avoided headcount and onboarding for potential new team members
  • Security-breach cost avoidance by extending the team with a dedicated MDR services provider

This led to total quantified benefits with a present value of $4.03 million over three years.

3. Potential benefit

The above stat is great, but you may be asking what sort of start-up costs did the composite organization incur? According to the Forrester study, for the composite organization, partnering with Rapid7 MDR meant spending around $620,000 over the course of three years. Digging into that number a bit more, the organization spread the investment into smaller yearly increments.

Compared to the costs of hiring multiple full-time employees (FTEs) who can do exactly what one needs them to do (and hopefully more), $620,000 quickly begins to look more attractive than what one might pay those FTEs over, say, five years. For a deeper dive into the actual purchasing process of MDR services, check out this handy MDR buyer’s guide.

4. Payback period

For the total three-year investment of just over $620,000, the composite organization experienced payback in less than three months! At the time of the investment in Rapid7 MDR, the composite organization had key objectives like improved visibility across the entire security environment, a complete security solution backed by the right expertise, and 24/7/365 coverage.

The chief information security officer at a healthcare firm said it took two members of their security team, each working four hours a day over the course of two weeks, to complete implementation. In some instances, Rapid7 MDR was able to detect and respond to incidents the first day the service was live.

A complete economic picture

When it comes to under-resourced teams, the economics boil down to a simple comparison: The costs for an MDR provider like Rapid7 versus a potential multiyear attempt to stretch an already-overloaded staff to investigate every alert and mitigate every threat.

Impact aside, a year of MDR service can often equate to the cost of one or two open headcounts. At that point, the economic benefits are the cherry on top. After all, it’s always easier (and more impactful) to instantly extend your team with expert headcount, saving time and resources in onboarding and bringing in experts ready to make an impact from day one. Bundle it all together and you’re building a business case for the potential to bring your organization greater expertise, significant cost avoidance, and positive ROI.

At the end of the day, Rapid7 MDR can give existing security specialists some much-needed breathing room while helping the business into a better overall competitive position. Put another way: More coverage. More money. More time. Less stress.
You can read the entire Forrester Consulting TEI study to get the deep-dive from interviewed customers – along with the numbers and stories they shared – on Rapid7 MDR.

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.

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Are You in the 2.5% Who Meet This Cybersecurity Job Requirement?

Post Syndicated from Amy Hunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/05/20/are-you-in-the-2-5-who-meet-this-cybersecurity-job-requirement/

Are You in the 2.5% Who Meet This Cybersecurity Job Requirement?

Of course you’re special. (So are we.) But decades of research tells us humans believe they’re good multitaskers – and we are really, seriously not.

It seems a measly 2.5% of us can multitask well.

The rest of us are best when we focus on a single goal, allowing the left and right sides of our brains (specifically the prefrontal cortex) to work in harmony.

When we go for two goals at once, the brain splits duties, and we miss details, make mistakes. And it’s not a perfect 50/50 split: The work effort is more like 40/40, with an overhead charge just for the juggling. Trying to do three tasks? The brain’s information filters fizzle out. We don’t dismiss irrelevancies as quickly. There is guessing involved.

The truth is, multitasking isn’t a thing. The average security operations center (SOC) has 45 different cybersecurity technologies, according to an IBM study. What’s actually happening is task-switching and, even worse, context-switching.

The good news? Trends for 2022 point to change: a year of consolidation, greater detection and response capabilities on endpoints and in the cloud, and the integration of tools that simplifies and smooths the work.

It’s time to say goodbye to context-switching

You’ll never get ahead of attackers without the freedom to focus. And that fact has always inspired Rapid7’s continuous mission to accelerate detection and response with InsightIDR.

  • As a unified SIEM and XDR, InsightIDR automatically creates one cohesive picture from diverse telemetry, including endpoint, cloud, applications, logs, network, and users.
  • Alerts are highly correlated by our SOC experts, and high-context investigation details blend relevant data from different event sources for you.
  • No tab-hopping in and out of multiple tools: Embedded automation workflows powered by Rapid7’s InsightConnect let users focus on threats and decisions in real time.
  • Rather than asking you to do more, InsightIDR’s cloud-native, SaaS foundation ensures that users have the scale, agility, and power to keep up, no matter how their environments grow and change.

Technology that doesn’t understand how to really serve people can stress even the most sophisticated among us. Add to that the frustration that most C-suite executives don’t understand what life in SecOps is like either: Most don’t get that a breach is inevitable, and 97% of them believe security teams have big budgets and could improve on the value they deliver. Here’s ZDNet, reporting on IBM data that reveals security folks generally agree: “74% of [security practitioners] say their cybersecurity planning posture still leaves much to be desired, with no plans, ad-hoc plans, or inconsistency still a thorn in the side of IT staff.”

If the thorn is alert fatigue and context switching – and it probably is – the answer isn’t changing your personal attentiveness habits. When you seek out advice about how to stop all the multitasking, you’ll get suggestions that no CISO can take:

  • “Plan your day,” they say.
  • “Turn off your notifications.”
  • “Learn to say no,” they say.

The human factor is decisive in cybersecurity, so we task our technology to empower you – to give you the freedom to focus on what matters. Of course, it’s theoretically possible you’re in the 2.5% of people who qualify as “supertaskers.” (But as you may have noted from our first comic book we made for you, we think you’re superheroes, which is very, very different.)

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Unsung Security Superheroes: You’re Now Sung

Post Syndicated from Amy Hunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/05/05/unsung-security-superheroes-youre-now-sung/

Unsung Security Superheroes: You’re Now Sung

Unsung Security Superheroes: You’re Now Sung

Get your copy of Rapid7’s first comic: XDR vs. Exploito. Available now!

We’re all more connected than ever, and security practitioners keep everyone – governments, organizations, businesses, and 4.95 billion people – as safe as they can be.

“XDR vs Exploito” isn’t “Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” with a $200 million Marvel Comics budget – but it’s a laugh. And it puts security practitioners in the pantheon of greats like Spidey. Let’s be real, that’s the work you do (and we do too).

The effect the comic book had on us, as a thing we worked on, was refreshing. The Mayo Clinic says a little laugh enhances your intake of oxygen-rich air, reduces physical symptoms of stress, and increases the endorphins released by the brain. We say bring that on. You?

The story

Our CISO Adira Adama has tangled with the evil Exploito before, sometimes as her mild-mannered self, and sometimes as her superhero alter ego. Now, the two match wits again at Exploito’s next target – and Adira’s new job – where she plans to deploy InsightIDR, Rapid7’s unified SIEM and XDR.

But first, Adira confronts chaos: a hodgepodge of legacy tools, a burnt out SOC team, and nervous executives who’ll turn on her if she stumbles.

Get the whole story here.

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3 Ways InsightIDR Users Are Achieving XDR Outcomes

Post Syndicated from Jesse Mack original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/04/12/3-ways-insightidr-users-are-achieving-xdr-outcomes/

3 Ways InsightIDR Users Are Achieving XDR Outcomes

The buzz around extended detection and response (XDR) is often framed in the future tense — here’s what it will be like when we can start bringing more sources of telemetry into our detections, or what will happen when we can use XDR to really start reducing false positives. But users of InsightIDR, Rapid7’s cloud SIEM and XDR solution, are already making those outcomes a reality.

Turns out, InsightIDR has been doing XDR for a long time, bringing those promised results to life before the industry started to associate them with XDR. Here are 3 ways our customers are benefiting from those outcomes.

1. Gain greater visibility

You can’t manage what you don’t measure — and you certainly can’t measure what you don’t see or know is happening. The same applies to threat detection. If you never detect malicious activity, you never have a chance to respond or remediate — until you’re already reeling from the impacts of a breach and trying to limit the damage.

Greater visibility is part of the promise of XDR. By bringing in a wider range of telemetry sources than security operations center (SOC) teams have previously had access to, XDR aims to paint a fuller picture of attacker behavior, so security teams can better analyze and respond to it.

And as it turns out, this enhanced visibility is one of the key benefits InsightIDR has been helping users achieve.

“Rapid7 InsightIDR gives us visibility into the activities on our servers and network. Before, we were blind,” says Karien Greeff, Director, Security at ODEK Technologies.

For many users, this boost in visibility is translating directly into more effective action.

“Rapid7 InsightIDR vastly improved the visibility of our network, endpoints, and weak spots. We now have the ability to respond to threats we didn’t see before we had InsightIDR,” says Robert Middleton, Network Administrator at CU4SD.

2. Focus on what matters

Of course, visibility is only as good as what you do with it. Alert fatigue is a problem SOC analysts know all too well — so if you can suddenly detect a wealth of additional activity on your network, you need some way to prioritize that information.

InsightIDR user Kerry LeBlanc, who is responsible for cybersecurity at medical technology innovator Bioventus, notes that next-level visibility — “Everything comes into InsightIDR. I mean, everything,” he quips in a case study — is just the start of the improvements the tool has made for Kerry and his team.

“The other major change, and this is part of extended detection and response (XDR), is being able to correlate, analyze, prioritize, and remediate as quickly as possible. Rapid7 does that because it has visibility into everything,” he says. “It can build context around the threats and the events. It can help prioritize them for a higher level of awareness. I can focus on them a lot quicker, and it gives me the opportunity to reduce severity and eliminate further impact.”

Kerry isn’t the only one who’s using InsightIDR to help filter out the noise and focus on the alerts that truly matter.

“Rapid7 InsightIDR has given us the ability to hone in on specific incidents without the need to remove the unnecessary chatter,” says one VP of security at a large enterprise financial services company. “We now have the ability to view our environment with a single pane of glass providing relative information quickly.”

3. Do more with one tool

The relationship between XDR and SIEM has been much talked about in security circles, and it’s still a dynamic question. While some see these markets colliding at some point in the distant future, others identify SIEM and XDR as solving separate but complementary use cases. Nevertheless, the ability to consolidate tools and do more with a single solution is one of the hopes for XDR — and some InsightIDR users are already beginning to make that a reality.

“InsightIDR has been a great tool that is easy to deploy and cover several needed security functions such as SIEM, deception, EDR, UBA, alerting, threat feeds, and reporting,” a Senior Director of Security says via Gartner Peer Insights.

That streamlining of the security tech stack can be especially impactful for organizations that haven’t updated their threat detection solutions in some time.

“With Rapid7 InsightIDR, we were able to eliminate multiple old products and workflows,” says one Chief Security Officer at a medium enterprise media and entertainment company.

Start seeing XDR outcomes now

If you’re considering whether to embrace XDR at your organization, it might seem like the payoff will be further down the line, when the product category truly reaches maturity — but as the attack landscape grows increasingly complex, security analysts simply don’t have the luxury to wait. Luckily, those benefits might be closer than you think. With InsightIDR, customers are already enjoying many of the outcomes that SOC teams are seeking from XDR adoption: more visibility, improved signal-to-noise, and a more consolidated security stack.

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MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: InsightIDR Drives Strong Signal-to-Noise

Post Syndicated from Sam Adams original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/03/31/mitre-engenuity-att-ck-evaluation-insightidr-drives-strong-signal-to-noise/

MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: InsightIDR Drives Strong Signal-to-Noise

Rapid7 is very excited to share the results of our participation in MITRE Engenuity’s latest ATT&CK Evaluation, which examines how adversaries abuse data encryption to exploit organizations.

With this evaluation, our customers and the broader security community get a deeper understanding of how InsightIDR helps protectors safeguard their organizations from destruction and ransomware techniques, like those used by the Wizard Spider and Sandworm APT groups modeled for this MITRE ATT&CK analysis.

MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: InsightIDR Drives Strong Signal-to-Noise

What was tested

At the center of InsightIDR’s XDR approach is the included endpoint agent: the Insight Agent. Rapid7’s universal Insight Agent is a lightweight endpoint software that can be installed on any asset – in the cloud or on-premises – to collect data in any environment. The Insight Agent enables our EDR capabilities that are the focus of this ATT&CK Evaluation.

Across both Wizard Spider and Sandworm attacks, we saw strong results indicative of the high-fidelity endpoint detections you can trust to identify real threats as early as possible.

Building transparency and a foundation for dialogue with MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK evaluations

Since the launch of MITRE ATT&CK in May 2015, security professionals around the globe have leveraged this framework as the “go-to” catalog and reference for cyberattack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). With this guide in hand, security teams visualize detection coverage and gaps, map out security plans and adversary emulations to strengthen defenses, and quickly understand the criticality of threats based on where in the attack chain they appear. Perhaps most importantly, ATT&CK provides a common language with which to discuss breaches, share known adversary group behaviors, and foster conversation and shared intelligence across the security community.

MITRE Engenuity’s ATT&CK evaluation exercises offer a vehicle for users to “better understand and defend against known adversary behaviors through a transparent evaluation process and publicly available results — leading to a safer world for all.” The 2022 MITRE ATT&CK evaluation round focuses on how groups leverage “Data Encrypted for Impact” (encrypting data on targets to prevent companies from being able to access it) to disrupt and exploit their targets. These techniques have been used in many notorious attacks over the years, notably the 2015 and 2016 attacks on Ukrainian electric companies and the 2017 NotPetya attacks.

How to use MITRE Engenuity evaluations

One of the most compelling parts of the MITRE evaluations is the transparency and rich detail provided in the emulation, the steps of each attack, vendor configurations, and detailed read-outs of what transpired. But remember: These vendor evaluations do not necessarily reflect how a similar attack would play out in your own environment. There are nuances in product configurations, the sequencing of events, and the lack of other technologies or product capabilities that may exist within your organization but didn’t in this scenario.

It’s best to use ATT&CK Evaluations to understand how a vendor’s product, as configured, performed under specific conditions for the simulated attack. You can analyze how a vendor’s offering behaves and what it detects at each step of the attack. This can be a great start to dig in for your own simulation or to discuss further with a current or prospective vendor. Consider your program goals and metrics that you are driving towards. Is more telemetry a priority? Is your team driving toward a mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) benchmark? These and other questions will help provide a more relevant view into these evaluation results in a way that is most relevant and meaningful to your team.

InsightIDR delivers superior signal-to-noise

Since the evolution of InsightIDR, we made customer input our “North Star” in guiding the direction of our product. While the technology and threat landscape continues to evolve, the direction and mission that our customers have set us on has remained constant: In a world of limitless noise and threats, we must make it possible to find and extinguish evil earlier, faster, and easier.

Simple to say, harder to do.

While traditional approaches give customers more buttons and levers to figure it out themselves, Rapid7’s approach is from a different angle. How do we provide sophisticated detection and response without creating more work for an already overworked SOC team? What started as a journey to provide (what was a new category at the time) user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) evolved into a leading cloud SIEM, and it’s now ushering in the next era of detection and response with XDR.

MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: InsightIDR Drives Strong Signal-to-Noise
https://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/insightIDR/facts/CAA-CCB-F73

Key takeaways of the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation

  • Demonstrated strong visibility across ATT&CK, with telemetry, tactic, or technique coverage across 18 of the 19 phases covered across both simulations
  • Consistently indicated threats early in the cyber killchain, with solid detections coverage across Initial Compromise in the Sandworm evaluation and both Initial Compromise and Initial Discovery in the Wizard Spider evaluation
  • Showcased our commitment to providing a strong signal-to-noise ratio within our detections library with targeted and focused detections across each phase of the attack (versus alerting on every small substep)

As our customers know, these endpoint capabilities are just the tip of the spear with InsightIDR. While not within the scope of this evaluation, we also fired several targeted alerts that didn’t map to MITRE-defined subtypes — offering additional coverage beyond the framework. We know that with our other native telemetry capabilities for user behavior analytics, network traffic analysis, and cloud detections, InsightIDR provides relevant signals and valuable context in a real-world scenario — not to mention the additional protection, intelligence, and accelerated response that the broader Insight platform delivers in such a use case.

MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation: InsightIDR Drives Strong Signal-to-Noise
https://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/insightIDR/facts/7D5-BD6-54D

Thank you!

We want to thank MITRE Engenuity for the opportunity to participate in this evaluation. While we are very proud of our results, we also learned a lot throughout the process and are actively working to implement those learnings to improve our endpoint capabilities for customers. We would also like to thank our customers and partners for their continued feedback. Your insights continue to inspire our team and elevate Rapid7’s products, making more successful detection and response accessible for all.

To learn more about how Rapid7 helps organizations achieve stronger signal-to-noise while still having defense in depth across the attack chain, join our webcast where we’ll be breaking down this evaluation and more.

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Demystifying XDR: The Time for Implementation Is Now

Post Syndicated from Jesse Mack original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/03/30/demystifying-xdr-the-time-for-implementation-is-now/

Demystifying XDR: The Time for Implementation Is Now

In previous installments of our conversation with Forrester Analyst Allie Mellen on all things extended detection and response (XDR), she helped us understand not only the foundations of the product category and its relationship with security information and event management (SIEM), but also the role of automation and curated detections. But Sam Adams, Rapid’s VP of Detection and Response, still has a few key questions, the first of which is: What do XDR implementations actually look like today?

A tale of two XDRs

Allie is quick to point out what XDR looks like in practice can run the gamut, but that said, there are two broad categories that most XDR implementations among security operations centers (SOCs) fall under right now.

XDR all-stars

These are the organizations that “are very advanced in their XDR journey,” Allie said.”They are design partners for XDR; they’re working very closely with the vendors that they’re using.” These are the kinds of organizations that are looking to XDR to fully replace their SIEM, or who are at least somewhat close to that stage of maturity.

To that end, these security teams are also integrating their XDR tools with identity and access management, cloud security, and other products to create a holistic vision.

Targeted users

The other major group of XDR adopters is those utilizing the tool to achieve more targeted outcomes. They typically purchase an XDR solution and have this running alongside their SIEM — but Allie points out that this model comes with some points of friction.

“The end users see the overlapping use cases between SIEM and XDR,” she said, “but the outcomes that XDR is able to provide are what’s differentiating it from just putting all of that data into the SIEM and looking for outcomes.”



Demystifying XDR: The Time for Implementation Is Now

The common ground

This relatively stratified picture of XDR implementations is due in large part to how early-stage the product category is, Allie notes.

“There’s no one way to implement XDR,” she said. “It’s kind of a mishmash of the different products that the vendor supports.”

That picture is likely to become a lot clearer and more focused as the category matures — and Allie is already starting to see some common threads emerge. She notes that most implementations have a couple things in common:

  • They are at some level replacing endpoint detection and response (EDR) by incorporating more sources of telemetry.
  • They are augmenting (though not always fully replacing) SIEM solutions’ capabilities for detection and response.

Allie expects that over the next 5 years, XDR will continue to “siphon off” those uses cases from SIEM. The last one to fall will likely be compliance, and at that point, XDR will need to evolve to meet that use case before it can fully replace SIEM.

Why now?

That brings us to Sam’s final question for Allie: What makes now the right time for the shift to XDR to really take hold?

Allie identifies a few key drivers of the trend:

  • Market maturity: Managed detection and response (MDR) providers have been effectively doing XDR for some time now — much longer than the category has been defined. This is encouraging EDR vendors to build these capabilities directly into their platforms.
  • Incident responders’ needs: SOC teams are generally happy with EDR and SIEM tools’ capabilities, Allie says — they just need more of them. XDR’s ability to introduce a wider range of telemetry sources is appealing in this context.
  • Need for greater ROI: Let’s be real — SIEMs are expensive. Security teams are eager to get the most return possible out of the tools they are investing so much of their budget into.
  • Talent shortage: As the cybersecurity skills shortage worsens and SOCs are strapped for talent, security teams need tools that help them do more with less and drive outcomes with a leaner staff.



Demystifying XDR: The Time for Implementation Is Now

For those looking to begin their XDR journey in response to some of these trends, Allie recommends ensuring that your vendor can offer strong behavioral detections, automated response recommendations, and automated root-cause analysis, so your analysts can investigate faster.

“These three things are really critical to building a strong XDR capability,” she said,”and even if it’s a roadmap item for your vendor, that’s going to give you a good basis to build from there.”

Want more XDR insights from our conversation with Allie? Check out the full talk.

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SIEM and XDR: What’s Converging, What’s Not

Post Syndicated from Amy Hunt original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/03/23/siem-and-xdr-whats-converging-whats-not/

SIEM and XDR: What’s Converging, What’s Not

Let’s start with the conclusion: Security incident and event management (SIEM) isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Today, most security analysts are using their SIEMs for detection and response, making it the core tool within the security operations center (SOC). SIEM aggregates and monitors critical security telemetry, enables companies to monitor and detect threats specific to their environment and policy violations, and addresses key regulatory and compliance use cases. It has served – and will continue to serve – very important, specific purposes in the security technology stack.

Where SIEMs have traditionally struggled is in keeping pace with the threat landscape. It expands and changes daily. Very, very few security teams have the resources to consume all the relevant threat intelligence, then create the rules and configure the detections necessary to find them.

Rapid7’s SIEM, InsightIDR, is the exception, designed with a detections-first approach.

InsightIDR leverages internal and external threat intelligence, encompassing your entire attack surface. Our detection library includes threat intelligence from Rapid7’s open-source community, advanced attack surface mapping, and proprietary machine learning. Detections are curated and constantly fine-tuned by our expert Threat Intelligence and Detections Engineering team.

InsightIDR is the only SIEM that can actually do extended detection and response (XDR). And we can’t help but think all the XDR buzz is the security industry’s way of letting you know that, yes, detection and response performance is still lacking.

A cloud SIEM can provide a strong XDR foundation — agile, tailored, adaptable, and elastic

A cloud SIEM approach gives you an elastic data lake that lets you collect and process telemetry across the environment. And the core benefits of SIEM are yours: log retention, fast and flexible search, reporting, and the ability to fine-tune and customize policy violations or other rules specifically for their environment or organization. Cloud SIEM with user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and correlation capabilities can already achieve XDR, tying disparate data sources together to normalize, correlate/attribute, and analyze.

Of course, some customers that purchased traditional SIEM for detection and response haven’t been able to get those outcomes. They don’t have a next-generation SIEM that supports big data and real-time event analysis. Perhaps machine learning and behavioral analytics aren’t there yet.

Or maybe the SIEM has security teams drowning in alerts, ignoring too many of them. Detection and response is really hard — and it really is a symphony — especially as the environment continues to sprawl and resources remain scarce.

XDR aims to solve the challenges of the SIEM tool for effective detection and response to targeted attacks and includes behavior analysis, threat intelligence, behavior profiling, recommendations, and automation. The foundation is everything.

When we introduced InsightIDR some time ago, some criticized it as trying to do “too much”

It turns out we were doing XDR.

Today, our highly manicured detections library is expertly vetted by our global Rapid7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) SOC, where we also get emergent threat coverage. It’s single-platform, integrated with raw threat intel from Rapid7’s open-source communities (Metasploit, Heisenberg, Sonar, Velociraptor) and strengthened signal-to-noise following our acquisition of IntSights external threat intelligence.

Call it what you like

SIEM and XDR are described as “alternatives,” “complementary,” and also barreling toward one another destined to collide. We’ve read how one is dead and the other is the future. (Must it always be this way?)

No matter what you call it, focus on the outcomes, not the acronyms. It’s easy to get lost in the buzz, but the best products for your business will be those that address your top priorities.

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Demystifying XDR: How Curated Detections Filter Out the Noise

Post Syndicated from Jesse Mack original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/02/24/demystifying-xdr-how-curated-detections-filter-out-the-noise/

Demystifying XDR: How Curated Detections Filter Out the Noise

Extended detection and response (XDR) is, by nature, a forward-looking technology. By adding automation to human insight, XDR rethinks and redefines the work that has been traditionally ascribed to security information and event management (SIEM) and other well-defined, widely used tools within security teams. For now, XDR can work alongside SIEM — but eventually, it may replace SIEM, once some of XDR’s still-nascent use cases are fully realized.

But what about the pain points that security operations center (SOC) analysts already know so well and feel so acutely? How can XDR help alleviate those headaches right now and make analysts’ lives easier today?

Fighting false positives with XDR

One of the major pain points that Sam Adams, Rapid7’s VP for Detection and Response, brought to light in his recent conversation with Forrester Analyst Allie Mellen, is one that any SOC analyst is sure to know all too well: false positives. Not only does this create noise in the system, Sam pointed out, but it also generates unnecessary work and other downstream effects from the effort needed to untangle the web of confusion. To add to the frustration, you might have missed real alerts and precious opportunities to fight legitimate threats while you were spending time, energy, and money chasing down a false positive.

If, as Sam insisted, every alert is a burden, the burdens your team is bearing better be the ones that matter.

Allie offered a potential model for efficiency in the face of a noisy system: managed detection and response (MDR) providers.

“MDR providers are one of these groups that I get a lot of inspiration from when thinking about what an internal SOC should look like,” she said. While an in-house SOC might not lose money to the same extent an MDR vendor would when chasing down a false positive, they would certainly lose time — a precious resource among often-understaffed and thinly stretched security teams.



Demystifying XDR: How Curated Detections Filter Out the Noise

Got intel?

One of the things that MDR providers do well is threat intelligence — without the right intel feed, they’d be inundated with far too much noise. Sam noted that XDR and SIEM vendors like Rapid7 realize this, too — that’s why we acquired IntSights to deepen the threat intel capabilities of our security platform.

For Allie, the key is to operationalize threat intelligence to ensure it’s relevant to your unique detection and response needs.

“It is definitely not a good idea to just hook up a threat intel feed and hope for the best,” she said. The key is to keep up with the changing threat landscape and to stay ahead of bad actors rather than playing catch-up.

With XDR, curation is the cure

Of course, staying on top of shifting threat dynamics takes time — and it’s not as if analysts don’t already have enough on their plate. This is where XDR comes in. By bringing in a wide range of sources of telemetry, it helps SOC analysts bring together the many balls they’re juggling today so they can accomplish their tasks as effectively as possible.

Allie noted that curated detections have emerged as a key feature in XDR. If you can create detections that are as targeted as possible, this lowers the likelihood of false positives and reduces the amount of time security teams have to spend getting to the bottom of alerts that don’t turn out to be meaningful. Sam pointed out that one of the key ways to achieve this goal is to build detections that focus not on static indicators but on specific behaviors, which are less likely to change dramatically over time.

“Every piece of ransomware is going to try to delete the shadow copy on Windows,” he said, “so it doesn’t matter what the latest version of ransomware is out there – if it’s going to do these three things, we’re going to see it every time.”

Focusing on the patterns that matter in threats helps keep noise low and efficiency high. By putting targeted detections in security analysts’ hands, XDR can alleviate some of their stresses of false positives today and pave the way for the SOC to get even more honed-in in the future.

Want more XDR insights from our conversation with Allie? Check out the full talk.

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