As threats to your company’s infrastructure continue to involve, a traditional antivirus isn’t enough to keep you safe anymore. A more intelligent solution like an EDR is needed as a proactive layer.
We’ve rolled out CrowdStrike EDR to all our clients for this purpose. Let’s take a look at what an EDR offers and why it’s vital for your company.
What Is an EDR?
EDR, or Endpoint Detection and Response, is a security solution that constantly monitors devices on your network to detect digital threats. By keeping track of the users, processes, and changes as they happen, it goes much further than traditional antivirus.
Most antivirus solutions keep a list of files and programs known to be dangerous, and if they spot any of them on a system, they block them and alert you. This can work to stop a lot of threats, but it’s not a strong enough solution in today’s environment.
Traditional antivirus software can’t detect attacks from files it doesn’t know about. It’s also weak to fileless malware, a type of attack that uses short-term data in a system’s RAM to carry out an attack.
What Does an EDR Do?
How does an EDR provide protection in ways that an antivirus can’t? Let’s consider their advantages.
Real-Time Behavior Analysis
If your antivirus misses an attack, you likely won’t learn about it until it’s too late. An EDR is more proactive in that it actively analyzes events happening across your network and alerts you to suspicious behavior.
If it detects a sequence of events that match a known attack, it will alert you. Using the software, your IT staff can then follow along with the attacker’s movements, almost like they’re standing behind and watching.
This gives you immediate insight into the attack instead of trying to decipher what happened later. This advantage gives you a good chance of stopping the breach before it becomes a major attack.
Full Visibility of Events
Since an EDR solution records everything that’s happening, you can easily pull up an event and get the full context of it. Your security team can see what networks someone was connected to, who was logged into the machine, all processes that ran, and what removable media was used.
A traditional antivirus can’t provide this level of detail.
Provides Context for Events
This amount of data collection would quickly become overwhelming if you had to sort through it all manually. That’s why EDR solutions intelligently alert you to important events while not pinging your team for every little thing.
Alerts are customizable, and you can get a digest of low-risk incidents when it’s best for you.
Why Is an EDR So Valuable?
While antivirus can prevent a lot of common attacks, no solution prevents 100% of threats. And in the 1% of cases where something does get through, it can cause tons of havoc on your network.
We’ve talked before about the threat of ransomware encrypting your files and demanding a high payment to get them back. In the past few years, we’ve also seen major attacks where malicious individuals gain access to a system and play the long game by stealing files or setting up a bigger scheme.
Using an EDR, you can detect these issues long before a security agency or the software manufacturer discovers them. The EDR will detect malicious activity and give you ways to combat it, even if the exact method of breaching isn’t well-known yet.
With the full picture of the data available, and the software making it easy to digest, you can make an informed decision about how to best handle a threat. This could save you weeks spent deciding on a solution and resetting machines, which will hurt your company’s productivity.
An EDR Is a Vital Security Tool
Now you know a little more about EDRs and why they are a vital tool in the battle for security every company faces. Their proactive, comprehensive analysis of what’s happening on your network gives you the best chance of detecting issues early and quelling them before they blow up.
Some regulation standards and cyber insurance companies are even starting to require EDRs due to their efficiency. Given that insurance companies have paid the fee for ransomware before, it’s not surprising that they’d want this protection from their clients.
Next7 clients get CrowdStrike bundled with managed services.