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What is endpoint detection and response (EDR)?

Explore how EDR technology helps organizations protect against serious cyberthreats such as ransomware.
Discover EDR cybersecurity

EDR defined

EDR is a cybersecurity technology that continuously monitors endpoints for evidence of threats and performs automatic actions to help mitigate them. Endpoints—the many physical devices connected to a network, such as mobile phones, desktops, laptops, virtual machines, and Internet of Things (IoT) technology—give malicious actors multiple points of entry for an attack on an organization. EDR solutions help security analysts detect and remediate threats on endpoints before they can spread throughout your network.

EDR security solutions log behaviors on endpoints around the clock. They continuously analyze this data to reveal suspicious activity that could indicate threats such as ransomware. It can also perform automatic actions to contain threats and alert security professionals, who then use the recorded data to investigate precisely how the breach occurred, what it has affected, and what needs to be done next.

The role of EDR in cybersecurity

For organizations working to stay safe from a cyberattack, EDR represents a step up from antivirus technology. An antivirus program is designed to bar malicious actors from entering a system by checking for known threats from a database and taking automatic quarantine actions if it detects one of them. Endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) are the first line of defense including advanced antivirus and antimalware protection, and an EDR provides additional protection if a breach happens by enabling detection and remediation.

EDR has the ability to hunt for as-yet-unknown threats—those that get past the perimeter—by detecting and analyzing suspicious behaviors, otherwise known as indicators of compromise (IOCs).

EDR gives security teams the visibility and automation they need to speed up incident response and keep attacks on endpoints from spreading. They’re used to:

  • Monitor endpoints and keep an exhaustive record of activity to detect suspicious activity in real time.

  • Analyze this data to determine whether threats warrant investigation and remediation.

  • Generate prioritized alerts for your security team so they know what needs to be addressed first.

  • Provide visibility into and context for the full history and scope of a breach to aid security teams’ investigations.

  • Automatically contain or remediate the threat before it can spread.

How does EDR work?

While EDR technology may vary with each vendor, they work in broadly the same way. An EDR solution:

  1. Continuously monitors endpoints. When your devices are onboarded, the EDR solution will install a software agent on each of them to ensure the whole digital ecosystem is visible to security teams. Devices with the agent installed are called managed devices. This software agent continuously logs relevant activity on each managed device.
  2. Aggregates telemetry data. The data ingested from each device is sent back from the agent to the EDR solution, which can be in the cloud or on-premises. Event logs, authentication attempts, application use, and other information are made visible to security teams in real time.
  3. Analyzes and correlates data. The EDR solution uncovers IOCs that would otherwise be easy to miss. EDRs typically use AI and machine learning to apply behavioral analytics based on global threat intelligence to help your team fend off advanced tactics being used against your organization.
  4. Surfaces suspected threats and takes automatic remediation actions. EDR solution flags a potential attack and sends an actionable alert to your security team so they can respond quickly. Depending on the trigger, the EDR system may also isolate an endpoint or otherwise contain the threat to prevent it from spreading while the incident is being investigated.
  5. Stores data for future use. EDR technology keeps a forensic record of past events to inform future investigations. Security analysts can use this to consolidate events or to get the big picture about a prolonged or previously undetected attack.

Key EDR capabilities and features

A comprehensive EDR solution can give your security team distinct advantages that allow them to protect work data more effectively. It enables them to:

Eliminate blind spots

EDR allows security teams to get unified visibility and management of existing endpoints and to discover unmanaged endpoints connected to your network that might be introducing unnecessary common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). They can also use it to reduce attack surfaces by flagging vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Use next-generation investigation tools

EDR solutions work alongside your security team to prioritize the most serious potential threats, validate them, and perform triage actions in minutes.

Block the most sophisticated attacks

EDR solutions help security teams find sophisticated threats such as ransomware that continually shifts behaviors to evade detection. It’s effective against both file-based and fileless attacks.

Remediate threats faster

Security teams can reduce the time it takes to respond to threats with EDR tools that automatically contain an attack, initiate investigations, and use AI for cybersecurity to apply best practices and determine next steps.

Proactively hunt threats

EDR solutions apply rich behavioral analytics to provide deep threat monitoring, helping teams to sniff out attacks at the first hint of suspicious behavior.

Integrate detection and response with SIEM

Many EDR security solutions seamlessly integrate with existing security information and event management (SIEM) products and other tools in your security teams’ stack.

Why is EDR important?

EDR security solutions provide important protection for modern organizations. Antivirus and antimalware solutions alone can’t prevent 100 percent of the attacks that will likely be aimed at your network. Cybercriminals are continually evolving the tactics they use to evade perimeter defenses, and inevitably, some will slip past them. Security teams need robust tools to hunt down the small percentage of threats that can get past the perimeter and cause significant damage and data loss.

Threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, phishing, and ransomware can be disastrous for an organization’s operations and cost a great deal of money to remediate. Cybercriminals are increasingly well resourced and highly motivated. Infiltrating systems is a lucrative business for them, and they invest in advanced technology to make their attacks more successful. At the rate cyberthreat tactics are evolving, it makes good financial sense for organizations to improve their security posture to be proactive and to invest in technology that can tackle modern threats.

EDR has become especially important as more organizations adopt remote and hybrid work patterns. As employees connect to networks from geographically dispersed laptops, PCs, and mobile phones, security teams have larger attack surfaces to defend. EDR solutions give them the ability to monitor and analyze the data from these endpoints in real time.

EDR’s impact on incident response

EDR security solutions can help your team create efficiencies in every phase of their incident response plans. In addition to empowering teams to detect threats that might otherwise remain invisible, they can expect EDR features to alleviate manual and tedious tasks associated with the later phases of the incident response lifecycle:

Containment, eradication, and recovery. The real-time visibility and automation EDR solutions provide will help your team to quickly isolate infected endpoints, block traffic to and from malicious IP addresses, and begin to take next steps to mitigate the threat. The images EDR tools continuously capture of endpoints makes it easier to roll back to a previous uninfected state when necessary.

Post-event analysis. The forensic data EDR provides about endpoint activities, network connections, user actions, and file modifications can help your analysts to do a root cause analysis—identifying the origin of an event. It also speeds their process of analyzing and reporting on what worked well and what didn’t, so they can be better prepared for next time.

EDR and threat hunting

Proactive cyberthreat hunting is a security exercise analysts do to search their networks for unknown threats. EDR solutions support this by furnishing forensic data that can help your analysts decide which IOCs to target, such as particular files, configurations, or suspicious behaviors. In a cyberthreat landscape where malicious actors often lurk within an environment undetected for months, threat hunting is a valuable way to strengthen your security posture and meet compliance requirements.

Some EDR solutions will allow your analysts to create custom rules for targeted threat detection. These rules let you proactively monitor various events and system states, including suspected breach activity and misconfigured endpoints. They can be set to run at regular intervals, generating alerts and taking response actions whenever there are matches.

Make EDR part of your security strategy

If you’re considering adding EDR security capabilities to your defenses, it’s important to choose a solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and simplifies your security stack instead of making it more complex. It’s also important to choose an EDR solution that uses advanced AI so it can learn from past incidents and automatically handle similar ones to reduce your team’s workload.

Empower your security team to be more efficient and outmaneuver attackers with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Defender for Endpoint can help you evolve your security strategy to protect against sophisticated threats across your multiplatform enterprise.
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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

  • EDR is not simply antivirus technology. An antivirus program is designed to bar malicious actors from entering a system by checking for known threats from a database and taking automatic quarantine actions if it detects a threat. EDR provides even stronger protection because it has the ability to hunt for as-yet-unknown threats by analyzing suspicious behaviors.
  • EDR stands for endpoint detection and response, and in business, it’s an important tool to ensure that cybercriminals are unable to use employees’ laptops, desktops, and mobile devices to infiltrate work data and infrastructure. EDR gives security teams visibility into all of the endpoints connected to a network and provides robust tools to help them analyze threat signals and detect threats.
  • EDR works by continuously monitoring endpoints connected to a network and recording behaviors so security teams can more effectively defend an organization against threats. An EDR centrally aggregates telemetry data, then analyzes and correlates it for potential threats. It also takes automatic remediation actions if necessary and provides a forensic record of attacks to make investigations faster.
  • Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an enterprise EDR designed to help organizations prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats. It integrates with many other Microsoft solutions to provide holistic, best-in-class security.
  • XDR is a natural evolution of EDR. XDR broadens EDR’s scope, offering optimized detection and response across a wider range of products, from networks and servers to cloud-based applications and endpoints. XDR offers flexibility and integration across an enterprise’s range of existing security tools and products.

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