There is no doubt that a high rate of threat detection is a crucial indicator of success for a security system. Detecting 100% of active threats would seem to be the hallmark of an ideal security solution. However, evaluating success solely on threat detection provides an incomplete picture and can ultimately lead to suboptimal outcomes.

Why Perfect Threat Detection is not Enough

Consider this analogy: A weather forecaster who correctly predicts every rainy day achieves a perfect detection rate. However, if they also frequently predict rain on sunny days, their forecasts become less reliable and useful. These false positives would represent lost opportunities for people to enjoy outdoor activities, plan events, or simply leave their umbrellas at home.

Now let’s apply this analogy in the context of cybersecurity:

• Rainy days represent genuine threats that need detection.
• Sunny days incorrectly forecast as rainy represent benign activities mistakenly flagged as threats.
• Lost opportunities due to false rain predictions symbolize the wasted resources, unnecessary disruptions, and potential “alert fatigue” caused by false positives in security systems.

While many security companies promote bold headlines or highlight isolated performance metrics in their marketing, these headlines often tell only part of the story. How can you determine which solutions excel at threat detection while minimizing false positives?

WEI Roundtable: Cyber Warfare and Beyond

The 2024 MITRE Evaluation Framework Report

To find comprehensive information on security solutions, we recommend looking to the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations. These annual assessments provide an independent and objective analysis of enterprise cybersecurity solutions, offering insights beyond single-metric headlines.

MITRE is a not-for-profit organization that operates multiple federally funded research and development centers. They’re perhaps best known in the cybersecurity community for developing the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which has become an industry standard for documenting and categorizing adversary tactics and techniques. This year’s evaluation focused on two distinct threat areas:

• Ransomware attacks targeting Windows and Linux systems that emulate behaviors of well known groups such as LockBit and CLOP.
• Cyber operations by North Korea (DPRK) focusing on macOS, testing solutions against sophisticated multi-stage malware attacks.

These evaluations have been conducted annually since 2018, making the 2024 report the sixth round of testing. The 2024 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations report once again maintained its focus on accurate threat detection, while also introducing a more rigorous approach to evaluating false positives, incorporating two key metrics:

1. Total alerts generated: This metric helps assess the volume of alerts produced by each security solution, addressing the issue of alert fatigue in real-world scenarios.
2. False positives: MITRE incorporated “booby traps” or intentionally benign events that should not trigger alerts. Any security solution that flagged these legitimate activities as threats was documented as generating false positives.

The evaluation aimed to test vendors’ ability to balance high detection rates with low false positive rates. Alert fatigue is a major challenge today as alert overloads can overwhelm security teams, causing missed incidents and delayed responses.

A Perfect Score for False Positives

False positives represent more than simple detection errors as they can actively disrupt business operations. When security solutions incorrectly block legitimate activities at the prevention stage, these false alarms directly impact productivity and workflow efficiency. Some evaluated vendors generated more false alarms than successful threat detections, indicating significant challenges in distinguishing between legitimate activities and actual threats.

However, one security solution stood out against the others this year. Cortex XDR in the prevention stage of the evaluation. That represents a mistake-free performance. While Cortex XDR was not the only solution to achieve zero false positives, it had the highest prevention rate among all evaluated vendors with zero false positives. Simply put, no other solution matched Cortex XDR’s exceptional prevention capabilities with the same level of accuracy.

Cortex XDR: Unmatched Accuracy in the 2024 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations

Cortex was also the first participant ever to achieve 100% detection with technique-level detail and no configuration changes or delays. Achieving 100% technique-level detection means Cortex XDR was able to provide this high level of detail for every step of the simulated attack in the evaluation, without requiring any configuration changes or experiencing delays. This performance is considered exceptional in the industry, as it allows for immediate and comprehensive threat analysis.

Why This Matters for Your Organization

• Less Alert Fatigue: Reducing unnecessary alerts enables IT teams to focus on real threats.
• Faster Incident Response: Detailed detections allow for immediate threat containment.
• Lower Operational Disruption: Accurate prevention stops attacks without blocking legitimate activity.

It should be noted that like all solution participants, Cortex XDR was configured with default, fresh-out-of-box settings. No special steps were taken by the blue team that was charged with protecting against the red team tactics that were defined for this year’s report. Cortex XDR is designed to run mistake-free out of the box.

Conclusion

With zero false positives in the prevention stage and a 100% detection rate with technique-level detail, Cortex XDR has set a new benchmark for enterprise security. This means fewer distractions for your SOC team, faster incident response, and uninterrupted business operations, all without the need for complex configurations.

Is your security strategy keeping up? See how Cortex XDR can enhance your organization’s security posture with unmatched accuracy and efficiency. Schedule a demo today or connect with WEI to explore how we can help optimize your cybersecurity investments.

The post The Gold Standard: Cortex XDR’s Unmatched Results in MITRE’s Latest Evaluation appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Bad actors are waging increasingly sophisticated and frequent attacks, including ransomware, cyber espionage, zero-day malware and fileless attacks, to exploit endpoint vulnerabilities. These rapid-fire, diverse attacks are generating an average of that security teams must investigate, triage and address.

Traditional cybersecurity solutions that rely on siloed security tools cannot deliver the integrated data and powerful insights security analysts need to prevent, detect and respond to advanced attacks effectively. These standalone solutions require analysts to correlate data across multiple tools to build a full picture of an attack. This manual process takes valuable time, which is at a premium when an attack is underway or when a subsequent investigation must be expedited. It can also create blind spots that can lead to unidentified threats.

To address these diverse challenges, organizations need a comprehensive security solution that can seamlessly integrate with their existing technology environments. Yet, the technical skills shortage and speed at which attack scenarios change can handcuff organizations, making it difficult to keep pace with security demands. WEI’s security experts are certified at the highest levels by many of the cybersecurity industry’s leading providers, including Palo Alto Networks. This positions us to help organizations implement cybersecurity solutions that minimize vulnerabilities, streamline endpoint security operations, and outpace evolving cyber threats.

Cortex XDR Simplifies and Reinforces Endpoint Security

Enterprises can achieve the comprehensive visibility and speed they need to protect their organizations against advanced threats with by Palo Alto Networks. The extended detection and response solution works across all valuable data sources for detection and response, including network, endpoint, cloud and identity, to deliver a unified view of the attack landscape. Ultimately, Cortex XDR stitches this valuable data together, breaking down siloes to help analysts expose complex attack patterns.

The cloud-native platform combines the latest threat data using powerful machine learning (ML) and analytics to provide key insights into system behavior, network traffic and user activity. By integrating multiple endpoint security tools, the solution helps security teams address the full scope of security operations, without deploying additional software or hardware.

Actionable Insights for Rapid Detection and Response

Addressing continually evolving threats requires growing intelligence and the ability to act quickly. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics, Cortex XDR creates a trusted baseline of activity that can be used to identify anomalies and speed incident detection, analysis and response.

Cortex XDR also employs AI and automation to minimize manual processes and more rapidly detect and mitigate attacks. The cloud-native platform provides a scalable database that constantly collects both internal and external threat data to continually build its intelligence. Cortex XSOAR can automatically execute a response to an identified threat, accelerating reaction time and improving outcomes.

Streamlined Cybersecurity Workloads

Security teams have a lot on their plates. Cortex XDR helps simplify analysts’ responsibilities, allowing them to assess threats from a single console, rather than navigating between multiple interfaces. The platform also consolidates and automates multiple security tasks. By grouping related alerts and eliminating duplicate alerts that occur with multiple monitoring solutions, Cortex XDR reduces individual alerts by . The solution also ranks the criticality of alerts to help analysts prioritize their efforts.

AI and automation also help ease analysts’ workloads, eliminating the need to examine threat indicators manually and automating routine tasks such as alert triage and incident response. By consolidating and automating various tasks, Cortex XDR streamlines security operations, enabling security teams to focus on other strategic initiatives.

Cortex XDR Unifies Multiple Agent-Based Solutions for Simplified, Yet Powerful Endpoint Security

To protect their organizations, analysts must prevent, detect, analyze and respond to threats. Cortex XDR integrates multiple cybersecurity solutions to offer a complete cybersecurity stack.

Firewall: Preventing unauthorized network access is a critical first step in effective cybersecurity. The Cortex XDR host firewall allows organizations to control inbound and outbound communications on their endpoints. Organizations can set host firewall policy rules to block traffic on specific devices and apply them to endpoints. The agent also natively integrates with Palo Alto Networks WildFire malware prevention service and disk encryption capabilities to further limit risk.

Antivirus: Detecting and eliminating viruses is essential to safeguard the integrity of the IT ecosystem. Cortex XDR features next-generation antivirus to block attacks.

Endpoint Detection & Response: Cortex XDR’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agent continually monitors endpoints for lurking threats. Utilizing machine learning and analytics, the module can identify covert attacks and automatically execute the appropriate response.

Forensics: Investigating an attack is time consuming. The Cortex XDR Forensics module utilizes forensics data, artifacts and event intelligence to reveal the root cause and scope of an attack. The module allows organizations to review and analyze digital evidence, hunt for and authenticate threats, simplify triage and speed response. The ease of the module drastically reduces investigation time and enables analysts of all experience levels to triage incidents.

File Integrity Monitoring: Continually validating the health and behavior of the IT environment is critical to prevent or minimize the damage a compromised file can inflict. Cortex XDR BIOC’s can be configured to continually verify the integrity of operating system (OS), database and application software files, comparing the most recent versions to expected behavior patterns.

Device Control: USB devices can unknowingly expose an organization to risk. With the Cortex XDR Device Control agent, organizations can securely monitor and manage USB access to protect endpoints from active threats that can lead to downtime and data loss. Organizations can restrict usage by vendor, type, endpoint, and Active Directory group or user.

Search & Destroy: The best endpoint security strategies proactively seek out threats. The Cortex XDR Search and Destroy agent offers insight, manual and automated threat hunting capabilities, and custom rules to enable analysts to search for and eliminate evasive threats proactively. Analysts can also create attack hypotheses and use the module’s querying capabilities to uncover and eliminate suspicious activity.

WEI is Your Partner in Devising Your Endpoint Security Solution

As a Palo Alto Networks partner, WEI can help organizations take the critical step forward to improve their endpoint security with Cortex XDR. Our experienced team of security engineers can meet organizations wherever they are in their cybersecurity journeys, offering the deep expertise to:

• Guide the planning and implementation processes to achieve specific goals/objectives
• Identify which data sources to integrate with Cortex XDR to enhance visibility
• Customize threat detection and response strategies to address unique risks
• Develop automated responses to contain malicious activity quickly

Our customer commitment positions us as a long-term partner who can help security solutions evolve to address the ever-intensifying security landscape. When you’re ready to strengthen your endpoint security, WEI is ready to help.

Next Steps: Jeff Cassidy, the Manager of Cyber Security Operations Center at , joins WEI Cybersecurity Solutions Architect Shawn Murphy for an exciting discussion about modern cybersecurity. Topics the two experts dissect include the modern SOC, incident response, and threat hunting. Listen to the WEI Tech Talk here:

The post Achieve Comprehensive Endpoint Security with Cortex XDR and WEI appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Security concerns are constant for every enterprise. More employees working from home (or anywhere, really) and other factors leads to network complexity and growth in the cost of data breaches. This also impacts how much organizations are expected to spend on cybersecurity prevention. It is anticipated that companies will increase cybersecurity spending by 26% over the next five years. Luckily, there are advanced solutions such as Extended Detection and Response (XDR) that can help automate threat detection and save time and effort on staying cyber secure. In this article, we cover what XDR is and why it should be included in your future cybersecurity goals.

What Is XDR?

XDR is a rising cybersecurity solution that gives companies complete visibility into their entire network. XDR is a term used when you do not have the capabilities to cover a wide range of threat vectors. As an advanced cybersecurity solution, XDR focuses on endpoints and deals with threats directly and efficiently. XDR uses a lot of what makes security and information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) useful and extends each of these functions for a better cybersecurity solution.

simply explains, “XDR capabilities provide visibility and actionable insights across networks, clouds, endpoints, applications, and workspaces to help Security Operation Center (SOC) teams to hunt, investigate, and remediate threats.” Basically, these abilities allow for quicker detection of threats and improved investigation and response times through security analysis.

Why XDR Matters

Since XDR is a newer addition to the security solution market, it has many benefits that other options don’t feature. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, and SEIM and SOAR are not developed for these advanced attacks. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) and Network Detection Response are similar to XDR, however, they cannot respond to sophisticated threats quickly enough compared to XDR. Because of this, every organization should consider XDR. This solution has many benefits such as:

1. Consolidated threat visibility: XDR delivers visibility through data collection from email, endpoints, servers, and cloud networks.
2. Easy detections and investigations: XDR helps IT teams focus on high-priority threats. This cybersecurity solution can automatically detect stealthy threats and isolate anomalies that may come across as insignificant.
3. End-to-end orchestration and response: XDR provides automated alerts and strong response actions for sophisticated cyber threats.

Along with these main benefits, XDR solutions address a growing network’s complexity by detecting threats faster for more efficient threat blocking. XDR can automate threat detection and remediation to save IT teams time and effort by automatically discovering attacks while also looking for malicious activity. XDR approaches like aim to help companies with organization and control when it comes to cybersecurity.

About Cisco SecureX

Cisco SecureX is a security cloud-native platform that broadly connects Cisco’s integrated security portfolio and enterprise infrastructure for a consistent experience. It strengthens security across your network, endpoints, applications, and cloud and enables automation without needing to add new technology to your current security setup.

Cisco SecureX is also an optimal platform for integrating other security solutions. It simplifies the user experience by bringing together key security technologies that are necessary for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) flexibility and zero trust. This platform combines cloud security from Cisco Umbrella with zero trust capabilities from Cisco Secure Access. Users can incorporate a wide range of other tools with ease into Cisco SecureX. You can benefit from this integrated platform whether you only have one Cisco security product or many. It can serve as the foundation for a SASE architecture and protect your assets by integrating both new and existing technologies into your network.

Many organizations are already enjoying the benefits of XDR with Cisco SecureX. IT teams can focus on improving overall security efficiency and can spend less time working on manual tasks such as correlating alerts. SecureX helps companies detect, investigate, and resolve security events quicker with better insight. This security platform reduces the risk of a data breach by .

If you are just starting your journey of applying an XDR approach to your enterprise security or are looking for ways to improve your current XDR platform, SecureX is a strong solution to extend your detection and response.

The WEI security experts have extensive experience with Cisco network and security solutions. Lean on our experience to help you determine how your company can benefit from leveraging Cisco’s suite of security solutions and SecureX. Contact us today.

Next Steps: Read our solution brief titled, to learn more about the benefits of operating under a single dashboard. This will enable your security teams to have the necessary security visibility of your network endpoints, cloud, edge, and applications.

The post Why XDR Matters And How It Can Help Reach Modern Security Goals appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

In 2020, new IT Technologies emerged to drive change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As many enterprises shifted to a remote workforce, they were compelled to adapt to a new IT environment while still ensuring the security of their organization. As a result, three security technologies – SASE, ZTNA, and XDR – rose to the top in this new era of off-campus work.

At first glance, these technologies appear to be only marginally related. However, despite their differences, there is a commonality that ties them together – a more holistic approach to enterprise security.

With remote and hybrid workforces now a permanent fixture of the enterprise, we discuss these technologies and how they work together to provide a holistic security portfolio that is still relevant today.

1. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

SASE redefines the boundaries of enterprise security with its ability to deliver access policy, activity monitoring, threat prevention, and confidentiality through as-a-Service capabilities. With seamless and secure access to applications anywhere users work, enterprises avoid the bottlenecks often faced with traditional access architectures.

Because SASE is a collection of security techniques delivered as-a-Service, it’s still just as relevant today as it was a year ago. With a remote and hybrid workforce, this security technology provides the flexibility your employees need to work from anywhere.

2. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)

ZTNA allows you to have better control by requiring an applied policy to gain admission to a given target. ZTNA incorporates the concept of identity and access management to define the overall domain of information security.

ZTNA technologies reduce security risks and provide better visibility across your users, devices, networks, and applications.

3. Extended Threat Detection And Response (XDR)

The shift in network security architecture driven by factors like COVID-19 has impacted threat detection and response. The promise of XDR is to bring together detective controls such as endpoint threat detection and response (EDR) and network threat detection and response (NDR) into a coordinated and seamless process.

This threat detection and response technology offers comprehensive capabilities as a managed service, where the integration of processes reflects the nature of an attack, its mitigation in response, and follow-up steps for suppression and protection against future attacks.

How SASE, ZTNA, And XDR Come Together

With the remote and hybrid work environment a fixture of business operations for the foreseeable future, SASE, ZTNA, and XDR come together in harmony to provide you with a multifaceted, updated approach to enterprise security.

combines leading network and security functionality in a single, cloud-native service to help secure access wherever users and applications reside. In conjunction with SASE providing your employees the ability to gain secure admission to the required data they need, allows you to govern that access and offers in-depth visibility across your network. Furthermore, is a simplified security experience that unifies your threat detection systems in one location for high visibility while maximizing operational efficiency with automated workflows.

Employing these technologies together provides your enterprise with a holistic, multilevel solution.

Are You Interested In A Holistic Security Portfolio?

With SASE, ZTNA, and XDR solutions, Cisco understands the need for your enterprise to have a comprehensive portfolio that embraces a remote work environment. Contact WEI today to find out how these security technologies will optimize your enterprise.

Next Steps: Download our Cisco tech brief titled, to learn how to leverage SASE for greater business continuity and help your cloud workforce stay connected and secure.

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