What is threat detection and response?
Threat detection and response (TDR) uses behavioral analysis to detect questionable activity across your systems and networks. This could include unauthorized access attempts, unusual file transfers, sudden network traffic spikes, failed login attempts, and unexpected locations (such as an employee who normally operates in California suddenly accessing sensitive internal data from an IP address in Kazakhstan).
TDR encompasses two elements:
Threat detection uses proactive security measures and platforms to identify current security threats and prevent future ones. To do so, it first analyzes network and device activity to determine baseline behavior. Then, once it has learned your usage patterns, it can flag anomalous patterns and behaviors.
Using this information, you can then implement threat response—the remediation and security process that prevents data breaches and squashes vulnerabilities.
These two components together, as TDR, provide a set of continuous processes that proactively searches for cyberattacks and responds to them in real time.
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Additionally, TDR can leverage machine learning to detect novel malware and use safe sandbox environments to assess suspicious files. It can also incorporate threat intelligence feeds from security researchers about new attack methods, indicators of compromise (IOCs), and indicators of behavior.
Below is a comparison of threat detection and threat response and how they work together dynamically:
| What is threat detection? | What is threat response? |
|---|---|
| Analyzes your network and system activity to find baseline behaviors and spot anomalies | Proactively mitigates threat detections by isolating resources and remediating vulnerabilities |
| Leverages behavioral patterns to detect suspicious behaviors like unauthorized access attempts, spikes in network traffic, or suspicious login attempts | Stops attacks in progress by blocking IP addresses, disabling compromised accounts, and isolating compromised systems |
| Employs machine learning to find new malware and strange activity before the events become more significant incidents | Minimizes damage by isolating infected devices and shutting down affected services |
| Uses intelligence feeds and security findings to avoid innovative threats, attacks, and behaviors | Aids in faster system and data recovery after a security incident by facilitating restore procedures |
| Automatically and consistently scans for vulnerabilities that may lead to early threats | Prevents future attacks through proactive security posture management |
In the following sections, learn how TDR works, why you need it, and how to implement it with the right cloud native security platform.
Common cyber threats: Why you need TDR
Security teams use TDR processes and tools today to battle a vast number of threats, like the following:
Malware like viruses, spyware, ransomware, and phishing attempts
DDoS attacks that overwhelm your systems
Botnets for spam, sensitive data theft, and cryptojacking
Data theft, unknown vulnerabilities (zero-day threats), and other attacks that misuse legitimate tools like file transfer tools
Insider threats and anomalous behavior that comes from your own organization or partners, like strange user behavior, unusual logins, and unauthorized access.
Here’s how a TDR solution works for you every step of the way:
Establish baselines: A TDR tool examines normal usage patterns within your environment to recognize and react to anomalous situations later, like logins from foreign IPs.
Ingest threat intelligence: It then collates intelligence from industry sources to understand the latest attack methods, vulnerabilities, IOCs, and signs of persistence to ensure the most up-to-date protection.
Monitor 24/7: A TDR platform aggregates information from logged events across your environment—network traffic, endpoint activity, applications, SIEM solutions, cloud providers, user activity, and vulnerability scanners.
Analyze data: TDR performs real-time analytics to determine if the aggregated data conforms to the established baselines or if your security system detects an anomalous situation.
Alert your team: The tool can then initiate automated procedures to contain and mitigate potential problems and trigger incident response and recovery procedures, if necessary.
Remediate the issue: Lastly, TDR provides information that helps your security team pinpoint the problem and apply the proper mitigation or eradication procedures.
With TDR, your organization can get faster detection and response times, reduce dwell time, and minimize potential business disruption. It can also strengthen collaboration between security and operations teams by providing shared visibility into threat activity.
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What are the benefits of threat detection and response?
When implementing effective TDR, your security team can transition from reactive to proactive—the most important shift you can make when it comes to cloud security. This way, your team can block threats in real time and reduce the blast radius of incidents.
Below are a few more immediate benefits of a successful TDR initiative:
Full visibility: When you adopt a TDR solution, you get a holistic view across all cloud workloads, configurations, and runtime behavior. That way, you can reduce your dwell time, get faster root cause analysis, and lower the risk of lateral movement.
Intelligent risk prioritization: With a healthy TDR process, you can get prioritized, contextual security alerts. For example, you can use Wiz Defend to assess severity and blast radius in real time for quick responses and action recommendations.
Shift left capabilities: Though many security teams see the value in shifting security left, putting this practice into action is another matter entirely—and the tools you use make the difference. TDR helps you prevent future vulnerabilities across your DevSecOps team, especially when you combine it with a full cloud security solution.
Improved efficiency: When you’re no longer in reaction mode, you can anticipate the threat landscape and even innovate to meet emerging threats (like AI cloud security concerns) head-on.
Streamlined compliance: Yes, you want a safe cloud environment for your stakeholders—but you’re also answerable to governing bodies in the process. Tools like Wiz provide ample features, like over 100 frameworks, to help you ensure compliance. And with continuous monitoring, you can prevent costly and embarrassing breaches, too.
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Why do you need threat detection and response?
Without TDR, you may experience a variety of issues, like the following:
Threats that spread quickly if you can’t detect problems, investigate, and respond as necessary
Increased vulnerabilities to more complex attacks, like zero-day exploits, advanced persistent threats, and multi-vector attacks
A lack of real-time data and insights to identify and understand the scope of an ongoing attack
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When you don’t integrate security tools, you may lack visibility into your entire environment, which leaves you more at risk for undetected vulnerabilities. Plus, in the cloud, you’re at a higher risk of suffering a breach due to the following:
Zero-day attacks from previously unknown vulnerabilities
Fileless malware that’s difficult to detect through traditional means
Lateral movement, where attackers move undetected through your environment
Supply chain attacks from unknown vulnerabilities in a component or library
Container escape, which allows attackers to access other containers or the host
Misconfigurations, which leave data and systems exposed
Cryptojacking, which steals your resources to make money for others
Once attackers enter your environment, they can compromise user credentials, change systems’ and apps’ behavior, and encrypt or steal valuable data. For example, without TDR, a misconfigured storage bucket goes undetected for weeks, leading to a data breach.
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What challenges do teams face when adopting TDR?
Rolling out TDR requires careful planning and collaboration, like any IT change process. Otherwise, the following challenges could undermine the transition’s success:
Costs: Every major IT change has costs, so it’s essential to demonstrate clear ROI to ensure buy-in across the organization.
Talent shortage: Security teams may be apprehensive about the additional alerts and extra work that TDR may generate. Additionally, they’ll need training on the new system’s functionalities and best practices, which creates a learning curve.
Transition: Security teams may be concerned about compatibility issues or disruptions during the transition. To avoid these, there needs to be careful cooperation between IT and security teams.
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4 best practices for effective threat detection and response
Below is a list of four practices to consider for your TDR program:
1. Implement baselines and behavioral analysis
Every organization is unique and deals with different behavioral patterns. You can find your own patterns when you leverage tools like Wiz to analyze normal network, system, and user activity within your cloud environment. This helps you establish a baseline of behaviors so you can spot abnormalities in the future with your TDR.
For example, you can create a baseline around average traffic, login patterns, file access frequency, and other abnormal markers (like unusual foreign IP addresses or strange data transfers).
🛠️ Action step: Set up a cloud native security platform to monitor your traffic for the next few weeks to establish a baseline.
2. Incorporate threat intelligence
The key to being proactive is using your cloud security platform to detect evolving threats.
To consistently update your team on current attack methods and indicators of compromise, keep up with threat intelligence feeds for relevant information on threats and vulnerabilities. You can use these feeds to find reported IP addresses that bad actors use.
🛠️ Action step: Subscribe to three intelligence feeds on cloud security in your industry and integrate them with a SEIM system for actionable insights.
3. Automate your responses
Not every security issue needs manual attention. The more you can automate your security vulnerabilities, the more time you can spend dealing with pressing issues and emerging threats instead.
Automated tools like Wiz Defend enforce security measures like the principle of least privilege, disable compromised or suspicious accounts, and isolate infected systems. This can reduce human error and allow you to respond in real time.
🛠️ Action step: Establish automatic isolation protocols for systems that show compromise signs.
4. Leverage continuous monitoring throughout your environments
Use real-time monitoring across your multi-cloud infrastructure to monitor resources like endpoints, networks, and cloud workloads. To do this, you can employ a CNAPP to facilitate SEIM for centralized visibility. You can also monitor your container runtime events with cloud control plane logs to find privilege escalation attempts and suspicious activity.
🛠️ Action step: Deploy monitoring agents and automatic scanning throughout your cloud environments and on-premise systems.
Types of threat detection and response solutions
TDR is a general category that includes a variety of detection and response tools:
| Type | Decription |
|---|---|
| Endpoint detection and response (EDR) | Teams need EDR for faster threat isolation and response on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. This is especially important in today’s bring-your-own-device and work-from-home climates. |
| Cloud detection and response (CDR) | A CDR solution typically uses APIs from cloud service providers and workload, configuration, and user activity data via runtime events from container hosts and workloads. |
| Network detection and response (NDR) | NDR analyzes network traffic to identify malicious activity and prevent breaches for on-premises environments. |
| Extended detection and response (XDR) | XDR aims to consolidate events from on-prem and cloud-based security tools. |
| Identity threat detection and response (ITDR) | ITDR monitors identity behavior and detects misuse to prevent lateral movement and privilege escalation across cloud and hybrid environments. |
While each of these tools focuses on different segments of IT infrastructure, their shared goal is to enhance threat detection and the speed and effectiveness of responses to those threats.
What do you need in a threat detection and response platform?
When selecting a TDR platform, these essential features will help you cut down work for your security team while also reducing the odds of a security incident:
End-to-end visibility: Continually assesses real-time data, cloud activity monitoring, and audit logs to expose attackers’ movement in the cloud and allow for rapid detection and response
Real-time monitoring: Extends security capabilities to all cloud components (applications, servers, networking, virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes, and APIs) to eliminate blind spots and stop threats in their tracks
Forensic analysis: Dissects past attacks to prioritize real threats, minimize alert fatigue, and enable faster response
Automated response: Enforces least privilege, verifies identities, and runs pre-defined threat playbooks without manual intervention
Threat intelligence: Continuously ingests global threat intelligence to enrich alerts with real-time context so teams can rapidly assess threat severity and prioritize response based on actual risk and potential impact, which reduces response times and minimize false positives
Integration: Ensures that no threats fall through the cracks from “patchwork” security (multiple tools that teams join together for SecOps and DevOps), like when you rely on cloud provider solutions across multiple clouds
Prioritized alerting: Uses context-aware analysis to cut through the noise so your team gets actionable, pressing threats at the surface to boost efficiency
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Real-time threat detection and response in the cloud
All of the above features make up an effective TDR process—but only when they work together in a single, unified solution.
A CNAPP like Wiz’s provides the solution you need to unite them all in one place. Unlike legacy cybersecurity tools, CNAPPs have the unique capabilities to counterattack the emerging threats that are unique to your cloud or hybrid environment.
CDR tools like Wiz Defend also provide comprehensive visibility and real-time threat detection in your cloud environment. Here are its key features:
Integration with cloud logs: Wiz connects directly with your cloud logs to provide additional context and detections that are related to events occurring in your environment. This integration helps you correlate actions with the principles that performed them.
Real-time threat detection: Wiz’s solution detects various threats in real time, including brute force attacks, anomalous behavior, malware execution, and threats that originate from malicious IPs or domains.
Correlation of events: The platform correlates runtime workload events with cloud control plane events for a unified view of potential threats and their impact on your environment.
Attack simulations: Wiz offers safe attack simulations to demonstrate its detection capabilities. These simulations mimic an attacker’s actions—such as reconnaissance, lateral movement, and data exfiltration—without interacting with existing cloud resources.
Integration with native cloud security tools: This security platform also integrates with native cloud security tools like AWS GuardDuty, Google Security Command Center, and Azure Defender for Cloud to enhance threat detection and provide additional context.
By unifying cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection, and CDR within its CNAPP, Wiz enables a defense-in-depth strategy that proactively reduces risk with preventive controls while providing real-time threat monitoring and response capabilities for comprehensive cloud security.
Ready to get started? Sign up for a personalized demo today to see Wiz in action. Or if you want to learn more about TDR, get Wiz’s Quickstart Template for Cloud Incident Response for free.
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