Six ways Managed Detection and Response can prevent cybersecurity breaches

Let me share with you the following six enhancements businesses can benefit from as part of the MDR service.

Early detection of threats

By discovering threats and vulnerabilities faster, security breaches are contained in the kill chain's early stages.

• Avoid the attacks that have hit other enterprises and organizations. Every day, we see news about a specific security threat that has already claimed multiple victims. When their initial attack has succeeded, attackers typically repeat it against other targets across industries and geographies. Failure to learn about and act on these incidents can leave you vulnerable. Yet, do you have the time to keep track of all security attacks and attackers globally, learn from them, and apply those lessons in your network in the form of detection rules or response methods? The right MDR service can do all of that for you. It scans evolving threats as they happen, wherever they happen, and picks out the most relevant threats to your digital systems. It details the specific actions for your environment. This tailored threat anticipation goes far beyond traditional passive threat intelligence feeds available elsewhere in the industry.

• Detect hidden or unknown threats that were missed in basic security monitoring. Traditional security monitoring is rule-based, but attackers today can bypass those rules by using new techniques. Security analytics and machine learning are the latest methods to detect these advanced attacks. With an MDR service, you can benefit from enhanced security without the complexity of deploying your own big data analytical platform or hiring data scientists. Our threat hunting service uses a combination of AI and threat hunters to detect unusual machine behavior, malicious processes and files, insider threats, data exfiltration, and unusual application transactions to alert you to possible attacks.

Rapid assessment of attacks for better responses

If there is an incident or breach, you need to immediately know the extent and the severity of it to take appropriate action.

• Monitor attack campaigns instead of chasing individual alerts. Traditional MSS (managed security services) only provide visibility of point-in-time threats. You receive notifications as these threat events occur in your systems and network, but this may result in chasing many irrelevant alerts. Sophisticated attacks today often happen over more extended periods using multiple stages of a cyber kill chain. These campaigns can therefore go undetected in the deluge of daily alerts you receive. Our MDR service uncovers connections between signals over the longer term using analytics to detect attack campaigns and reveals the entire cyber kill chain. You can then mitigate relevant threats with better visibility of the attack as a whole.

• Quickly investigate the impact of the threats. Traditional security monitoring systems send you alerts based only on rules and signatures. You then need to investigate them to determine their relevance and the threat it poses to your environment. This process not only eats up your time, but the prolonged process can result in a catastrophic breach that could have been prevented with swift action. Today's fast-paced attacks can cause significant damage in the time it takes for investigation. At Atos, we have designed a system that speeds up the analysis on high severity threats so that you can know rapidly whether they are relevant and how much damage they can cause. Action can then be immediately taken before the incident progresses.

Containment of breaches and prevention

• Contain incidents at machine speed. If a breach is discovered, several urgent actions may need to be taken. It may be required to change configurations in firewalls or routers to block access, remove user accounts, kill a process or delete files, or apply virtual patches via intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and web application firewalls (WAF). Our MDR service automates these activities through an orchestration platform for immediate containment of breaches.

• Eradicate root causes beyond any immediate threat. Apart from containment, an effective incident response process involves three other critical steps: remediation, recovery, and lessons learned. Our incident responders maintain playbooks different incidents affecting your organization. These playbooks can be executed through collaborative workflows from the MDR service platform involving your team and our expert responders.

MDR – an essential layer of cybersecurity

Traditional managed security services (MSS) provide a base security in the form of log collection, log monitoring, scanning, and device management. MDR services build on detecting and responding to threats swiftly to prevent breaches that MSS may have missed. Together, MDR and MSS can provide a solid defense against conventional and advanced threats and attacks.

Topics

• Essentials
• Cybersecurity
• Data and Artificial Intelligence