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 11,000 alerts per week 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 Cortex XDR 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. Using predefined playbooks, 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 98%. 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 CyberTrust Massachusetts, 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:
