The statistics on cyber attacks are staggering. 2,244 attacks are initiated by hackers every day and damages from successful attacks are projected to hit $6 Trillion this year. While you may have implemented the basics – backing up your data, patching your systems, having good anti-virus and firewall – improving your security posture is going to require more. Cybercrime is an incredibly lucrative industry with many highly motivated criminals working to bypass traditional defenses. So what is Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and how will it help protect your business’s reputation and prevent financial loss?
Security operations are only as effective as they can rapidly and reliably contain threats. Effective security posture includes knowing what is going on in the threat landscape, who the bad guys are, and what tactics, techniques, and procedures they use to attempt to extort your business. Managed detection and response (MDR) is a service that uses security event management and advanced analytics to hunt down and analyze threats and stop them. How do we know there is an adversary in the environment? How do we understand who they are and what they are attempting to take? How do we respond to that attack and stop them from achieving their objective? While some automation is used, managed detection and response involves humans understanding business processes, individual users, and critical assets, and monitoring your network round the clock accordingly.
The technology deployed is designed for maximum visibility into your IT environment. This creates a baseline for analysts to learn the daily behavior of your network and employees within the context of your normal business processes. Once the analysts understand what activities and data are part of your day-to-day operations, they are able to apply behavioral analytics and threat hunting to identify and validate the outliers for attempted or active attacks. For example, when a computer is being accessed remotely by someone with no historical business need or known use cases of that information, an MDR analyst would stop that access and investigate the activity.
MDR is an active defense against a threat landscape that is creative, disruptive, and erratic. Are you prepared on your own to improve your security posture? Externally, can you defend ransomware, remote access trojans, keystroke loggers, insider threats, active intrusions, email takeover? Internally, can you keep pace with false positives, downtime, reimaging PCs, alert fatigue, tools & training, and staff turnover? Like any outsourced service, managed detection and response service providers allow you to extend your own security team with a team of experts and tools at a price you can afford.
Join Pearl President & COO, Floyd Bell, and Blackpoint Cyber’s Jamie Moore for a conversation on the state of cybersecurity and increasingly sophisticated attacks and further insight into what Managed Detection & Response (MDR) is and how it can protect your business. View the previously recorded webinar.
