As a professional threat detection and response service, MDR teams are comprised of cybersecurity experts who help organizations detect, respond, mitigate, and recover from security threats. An MDR service is particularly useful for organizations that desire extra security capabilities on top of their existing security systems. With the use of MDR, organizations can improve their security posture without the need for additional staffing and internal resources.
Why should you consider an MDR service?
Consider an MDR service if you have the following security challenges:
- You struggle to keep your security team fully staffed
It’s no secret that the cybersecurity industry suffers from a shortage of workers: estimates show a shortage of 3.2 million security workers. A lack of staff is a serious problem; threat analysis and incident response become vastly more inefficient without having the necessary resources. This is particularly true for organizations that, in order to keep up with advanced attacks, implement complex security technologies that they do not have the resources and skills to run and operate effectively. Unproductive system operations can end up hurting security teams by adding unnecessary cybersecurity friction.
MDR can help you use your resources more efficiently, such as reducing system configuration complexity and moving staff from mundane tasks to more strategic roles.
- Your team regularly deals with too many false positive alerts
The ever-complex security technologies are producing too many false positive alerts for security teams to handle. With too many false positives, analysts risk alert fatigue and overlooked incidents. Consider MDR services to help you remove false positives so that your analysts can focus on the true threats.
- You need more resources to deal with an evolving threat landscape and increasingly complex threats
Managing fast-moving, complex threats requires proactive threat hunting and a quick response.
MDR services provide 24/7 threat monitoring and response. Your organization can respond to threats at all times, even outside of working hours.
What services does MDR provide?
MDR offers three main cybersecurity capabilities:
Detect
Detect distinguishes true threats from false positive alerts. This service is particularly useful for security teams that regularly experience alert fatigue.
Important for detection is accurately tuned alert rules. MDR teams will accurately tune your alert rules to separate false positive alerts from true threats. Alert rules are tuned based on a cost/gain model of the rules. The alert rules with the highest gain and lowest cost provide the broadest threat coverage.
With accurately tuned alerts, security teams can determine which alerts to prioritize their analysis on.
Analyze
MDR services help organizations understand their threats by enriching security alerts with additional data, such as threat intelligence and open-source intelligence.
The additional data context provides insights into threats. Threat insights include information on where the attack is coming from, who the attackers are, and the motivation behind the attack. In other words, data enrichment helps organizations understand the risks to their organization. Risk is calculated based on the potential impact of the threat and the likelihood of the threat becoming an incident.
Based on the risk analysis, security teams can prioritize their threats and implement an effective security response.
Respond
MDR teams will advise on the most effective threat response. The response generally contains four phases:
- Identification of compromised systems as well as the attack techniques and tools used during the attack.
- Containment of the attack by limiting access and exposure.
- Recovering from the attack by restoring systems to normal operations. Any malware is removed, attackers are ejected, and persistent attack methods are rejected to remove any possibility of the attacker returning.
What are the concrete benefits of MDR?
- 24/7 proactive threat detection and response.
- Your security team can focus on strategic tasks rather than mundane threat detection and response tasks.
- A more efficient workflow with fewer false positives and increased focus on the true threats.
- Expertise in handling complex threats.
- Gain expert system configuration, advanced threat intelligence, and improved incident response.
Mix MDR with advanced technology
MDR services are more effective with the addition of technological solutions, like SIEM systems.
SIEM systems are security solutions that provide real-time monitoring and analysis of events, as well as tracking and logging of security data. By tracking anomalies in user behavior, SIEMs help organizations prevent potential cyberattacks and security vulnerabilities. More specifically, the solution helps organizations manage their event logs, provides event correlation, monitors incidents, and enables compliance management and reporting.
While necessary for threat detection and response, the problem with SIEM systems is that they require highly specialized knowledge to operate. And when they are managed inefficiently, they produce too many false positives that limit threat detection and response.
Seculyze: Empower your security team
Seculyze is a solution that automates and improves the capabilities of SIEM, like Microsoft Sentinel. The solution empowers your security team with the tools needed to maximize the potential of your security expertise. Take cybersecurity into your own hands and decrease reliance on external consultants.
The many benefits of Seculyze include:
- Automated alert rule tuning to remove false positive alerts and improve threat detection.
- Automated alert enrichment for improved threat insights and better alert prioritization.
- Accelerated threat response with actionable recommendations based on an informed threat profile.
- Lowered costs with decreased reliance on costly rework and expensive skills needed to configure and maintain Microsoft Sentinel.
Seculyze automates and simplifies Microsoft Sentinel operations to provide your security teams with the necessary capabilities for effective threat detection and response.
24/7 MDR expert consultants
Should you need additional help maximizing the potential of Microsoft Sentinel, reach out to our expert consultants. Our consultants can help you get the most value from Microsoft Sentinel with best practice configuration, lowered costs, and strengthened threat detection response.
