Quantifying Risk To Increase SOAR Effectiveness
September 13, 2021
SIRP and ThreatQuotient – Extended Detection and Response with Contextualized Intelligence
September 28, 2021
Quantifying Risk To Increase SOAR Effectiveness
September 13, 2021
SIRP and ThreatQuotient – Extended Detection and Response with Contextualized Intelligence
September 28, 2021

Powerful Threat Detection and Response with a Combination of XDR and SOAR

 

As the cyberthreat landscape expands, organizations often struggle to stay ahead of new threat vectors and threat actors. Sophisticated attack tools, new Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs), multi-stage attacks, and insider threats – modern security teams have to contend with all these challenges as they protect their organizations.

To overcome these challenges, they need a more complete view of the threat landscape, extensive investigative expertise, and advanced threat detection and incident response capabilities. Traditional Security information and Event Management (SIEM) systems cannot meet these requirements. This is where Security Operations, Automation and Response (SOAR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) come into play.

How SOAR and XDR Address the Weaknesses of SIEM

Traditional SIEM solutions provide a centralized source of truth for real-time security event analyses, early threat detection, incident response, and compliance. These solutions require rules optimization to reduce the number of false positive events. Moreover, their effectiveness depends on the sources of data, which is why SIEM output often results in too many alerts, false positives, and incomplete or inaccurate analyses. As the threat landscape evolves, SIEM cannot detect all incidents. And apart from generating alerts, it cannot take action on events, much less actively reduce risk.

SOAR and XDR solutions extend the usefulness of SIEM, while also effectively addressing its weaknesses. Like SIEM, SOAR ingests and analyzes data. It helps with threat management, vulnerability mitigation, and security operations automation. SOAR also automatically prioritizes, processes and responds to security events and incidents. Finally, SOAR can escalate threats when human intervention is required, improving on SIEM’s lack of actionability and general inefficiency.

XDR goes a few steps further than SOAR. Unlike SIEM, XDR can integrate with other security tools and threat intelligence for threat detection and incident response. It can apply consistent decision-making to analyze all events and alerts, while reducing the number of events that need to be handled by security analysts. Moreover, unlike SOAR, XDR does not require playbooks to correlate real-time threat intelligence with security data. On top of that XDR solutions provide better visibility, and can scale even to the largest environments.

The Evolution of XDR

XDR collects and ingests security data in one cohesive, centralized location to provide a complete view of the threat landscape. It also improves threat detection efficacy, provides automated – and therefore faster – incident response, and reduces the number of false positives that often lead to “alert fatigue”.

XDRs are usually available as Native or Single-stack XDR, and Hybrid or Open XDR.

Native XDR provides an all-in-one platform for threat detection and analytics. It only integrates with that vendor’s security solutions, and offers no third-party integrations or APIs. This limits its detection capabilities. It can also be expensive to implement.

Hybrid XDR solutions are often a better choice, since this type of XDR can also seamlessly integrate with third-party security tools within a central management plane for advanced threat detection and response.

How Open/Hybrid XDR Complements SOAR

With Hybrid XDR, security teams don’t have to replace current security tools. Instead, they can simply integrate the solution into the existing security infrastructure, and garner all the benefits of the integrated setup within a single platform.

Moreover, XDR’s advanced detection capabilities complement the existing SOAR solution by forwarding escalated alerts to automatically trigger incident remediation. To stop threat actors armed with sophisticated attack tools, organizations need the security automation and orchestration of SOAR plus the analytics capabilities of XDR.

The best way to leverage the best of both worlds is with a SOAR solution that includes XDR’s advanced capabilities: automated threat response and remediation, correlation of real-time threat intelligence with security data, and incident response via security policies. SIRP is perfectly placed to meet all these needs.

SIRP SOAR as XDR

Like Hybrid XDR, SIRP combines existing security tools into a single platform. It also integrates with multiple threat intelligence feeds to provide full context on every alert, and discard false positives. SIRP’s powerful automation and orchestration tools absorb relevant information from multiple security technologies, eliminate human error, and accelerate incident response. SIRP also takes SOAR several steps further with a one-of-a-kind, powerful security scoring module that calculates accurate, real-world risk scores for every alert, incident, threat intelligence and vulnerability.

XDR can improve security operations and ultimately, the organization’s security posture. However, implementing a Hybrid XDR solution on top of your existing threat response system can be time-consuming. If you require a solution that can detect and respond to threats, and also help with security policy and reporting, a SOAR solution like SIRP may be a better choice. Click here to know how SIRP SOAR can help your organization manage cyber risk and improve SecOps efficiency.