Extended Detection and Response – Page 2 – CyberSecurity Confabulation

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

Posted 3 years ago by Margaret Wei

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

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

Here are the Gartner report’s key findings:

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

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

Now, here’s what we think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted 3 years ago by Amy Hunt

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

Posted 3 years ago by Amy Hunt

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

Posted 3 years ago by Jesse Mack

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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What’s New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

Posted 3 years ago by Margaret Wei

Introducing new InsightIDR capabilities to accelerate your detection and response program

What's New in InsightIDR: Q1 2022 in Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investigate in seconds with Quick Actions powered by InsightConnect

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

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

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

More customizability with AWS GuardDuty detection rules

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

New pre-built CIS control dashboards and overall dashboard improvements

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

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

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

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

Continuous improvements to Investigation Management

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

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

Other updates

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

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

Posted 3 years ago by Sam Adams

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.

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.

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.

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

Posted 3 years ago by Jesse Mack

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."

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.

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

Posted 3 years ago by Amy Hunt

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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