Businesses are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals attempting to steal confidential information and disrupt operations. These attempts include phishing scams, malware infections, ransomware attacks, and denial of service attacks. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) can protect your business from these attacks.  

MDR is one of the most popular options for organizations that want to augment their cybersecurity threat-hunting and incident response management. But what is Managed MDR, and what are the benefits of this service? In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into what Managed MDR is and how you can choose the right vendor for your business. 

Defining Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a cybersecurity service that provides organizations with proactive threat-hunting and incidence response services. Managed MDR helps businesses minimize the gap between the speed of compromise and speed of detection, reducing attacker dwell time and mitigating the potential impact of a breach. 

With MDR services, your IT, OT or IoT environments are protected by an expert team of threat hunters and response experts who take targeted actions on your behalf to mitigate even the most sophisticated threats. An excellent MDR solution unifies your people, processes, and technologies, guaranteeing that every threat is visible— and making sure you have the right information at hand to respond to potential threats faster. 

How Does Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Work?

MDR services work by integrating a security platform, such as Microsoft Security with analytics and expert-led services such as Difenda, to provide 24/7/365 threat detection and response activities across the cloud, hybrid and on-premises environment. Your MDR service provider will identify all assets within your network, profile your current risks, and then collect activity information from logs, events, networks, and endpoints to monitor threat activity. 

Proactive MDR technology also works to simulate your environment and run continuous attacks based on current cyber tactics and techniques used to breach customer environments. Successful attack patterns are then translated into detection and response requirements, which are developed and released into your dashboards so you know exactly what response will be deployed when a threat occurs in your network.  

Discover the 4-step methodology that enables Difenda to provide actionable outcomes. View Difenda’s 4-step MDR process.  

The Key Benefits of Working with an MDR Vendor

Managed MDR allows organizations of all sizes to benefit from a world-class cybersecurity program. 

These services play a large role in improving a business’s entire security strategy; from people, processes and technology. They handle threat detection, incident response, continuous monitoring, analysis of IT assets and ultimately the communication of all of this back to the business.  

MDR services mitigate common pain points that modern IT departments usually face, such as high alert volume, threat analysis and skill shortages. Some of the key benefits of Managed MDR include:  

• Faster response times: 24/7/365 coverage with real-time threat monitoring and reporting capabilities across IT and OT environments allow your team to receive alerts faster than if your in-house team was only working nine to five.  
• Automation capabilities: Having a dedicated MDR team enables you to rely on artificial intelligence and automation processes to detect threats, such as zero-day attacks. Therefore eliminating the need for ineffective signature-based antivirus solutions that are taking up a substantial amount of your internal team’s time.  
• Better protection of sensitive data stored in cloud environments: Excellent MDR providers will run simulated attacks within your organization’s critical infrastructure and leverage a purple team approach to identify hidden threats, build detection use cases, and deploy updates to managed SIEM platforms. All of these processes help to mitigate risk within your cloud environment and draw real-time data for you to track assets within your network.  
• Increased visibility: By streamlining and coordinating your cybersecurity response and improving your data reporting capabilities with an expert cybersecurity team you will improve visibility to your attack surface.  
• Dedicated support: With MDR, your account is assigned a dedicated account team to ensure your valued outcomes are always in focus.  

Discover how to unlock improved visibility across OT, IoT, and IT for accelerated security and digital transformation. Download the MDR for OT eBook!  

What Tools and Solutions Should You Expect an MDR Vendor to Offer?

While all MDR services will be slightly different these are the staple tools and solutions you should expect to see:

• Threat Profiling: The best MDR providers perform threat profiling up front to minimize the number of false positives and accelerate alert validation. Reports should provide a high level of detail to determine the validity of the findings, as well as concrete steps to remediate. Effective threat profiling allows your company to gain critical insight into your organization’s attack surface and better understand your risks.  
• Endpoint Data: Your MDR service should include deep visibility at the endpoint and log data level. Effective endpoint monitoring helps prevent, contain, and remediate attacks from all threat vectors before, during, and after execution.
• Automation Capabilities: Excellent MDR services that will alleviate stress on your team will rely on artificial intelligence and automation capabilities to detect threats, including zero-day attacks, eliminating the need for ineffective signature-based antivirus solutions. Automated alerts will also be sent to your team when critical assets are affected or based on business priorities that you have outlined with your provider.
• Threat intelligence program: All MDR providers should be taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity, including actively hunting for threats throughout your security environment. Proactive threat intelligence combines manual and automated threat-hunting techniques to improve your threat-hunting programs. MDR programs should utilize advanced security and event management (SIEM) technologies to collect, analyze, and detect threats.
• Customized playbook design: Customized cybersecurity playbooks will outline a unique manual based on your organization’s outline that dictates what actions to take when data loss occurs. This ensures that you and your management team are on the same page and is a key component to reducing the risk of a critical damage if a data breach occurs.

How to Choose the right MDR Provider for Your Business

From threat hunting and defensive controls to responding and reporting, selecting a Managed Detection and Response provider that actually allows you to co-manage your program can be overwhelming. 

We put together a list of the 5 things you need to look for in MDR service providers and why: 

• 24/7/365 security analysts and incident responders: By monitoring your network at all hours, your MDR security team can quickly recognize abnormal activity and take immediate action to keep cybercriminals out of your system, at any time. 
• Highly Certified SOC: Highly certified SOC teams prove that the vendor has the necessary skills and ability to deploy and monitor your company’s IT infrastructure using MDR best practices. 
• Automation: Automated processes proactively alert key members of your security teams, ingest data and coordinate responses, to help your team respond faster. This reduces attacker dwell time and effectively helps to mitigate risk.  
• Live and On Demand Reporting: Comprehensive dashboards and real-time reporting capabilities, like the Difenda Shield can maximize visibility across your entire organization. 
• People, Processes and Technology: Simply put, technology alone won’t solve all your problems. Your MDR vendor needs to align all the people, processes and technologies in your network for a streamlined and efficient security system. 

Discover the 6 major red flags you need to avoid when vetting MDR providers in Your Guide to Selecting a Managed Detection and Response Provider.  

Difenda Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Our Difenda Shield platform is designed to provide customers with a streamlined ‘SecOps-as-a-Service’ experience through highly automated and orchestrated processes based on proprietary integrations with Microsoft 365 services and other supporting industry-leading security technologies. 

Discover the 6 Major Red Flags To Avoid When Vetting MDR Providers. Download Your Guide to Selecting an MDR Provider.