What is Network Detection and Response (NDR)?

Your organization can use a network detection and response (NDR) solution to monitor its network traffic. The solution identifies cyber threats and anomalous behaviors across your network, notifies you about network attacks, and can respond to them for you. On top of these things, an NDR solution provides you with network security insights that you can use to take your network protection and overall security posture to the next level.

What is Network Detection and Response (NDR)?

Network detection and response (NDR) refers to cyber security solutions focused on detecting and responding to threats within network infrastructure. Unlike traditional methods, NDR systems analyze network traffic and metadata to identify unusual patterns indicative of potential security incidents.

As cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated, NDR serves as a layer of defense by offering visibility and context that endpoint and perimeter-level controls might miss. This approach allows organizations to manage threats that evade simpler detection mechanisms.

NDR solutions operate by continuously monitoring network traffic, utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to spot anomalies. These technologies enable rapid threat identification and provide valuable insights into attack strategies. By focusing on network flows and behavior, NDR complements other defensive technologies.

Why is NDR important?

Cybercriminals can bypass endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions and many other security tools and technologies. They can also disable and delete system logs. However, cybercriminals cannot hide in a network — this is why network detection and response is key.

With an NDR solution, you can monitor malicious activity across your network that other security tools and technologies won’t necessarily see. Your NDR solution can detect abnormal network traffic flows within your network. This helps you secure your network perimeter and maintain control over what comes into and goes out of it.

How does Network Detection and Response work?

Highly performant NDR solutions use advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to model adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures that are mapped in the MITRE ATT&CK framework to detect attacker behaviors with high precision. They surface security-relevant context, extract high-fidelity data, and correlate events across time, users, and applications to drastically reduce the time and effort spent on investigations. They also stream security detections and threat correlations to security information event management (SIEM) solutions for comprehensive security assessments.

NDR solutions move beyond merely detecting threats, responding to threats in real-time by native controls, or supporting a wide range of integrations with other cybersecurity tools or solutions like security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR).

Benefits of implementing Network Detection and Response

• Improved Security Posture – NDR tools provide excellent visibility into the network infrastructure and can monitor for unusual activity. They can detect various threats like ransomware, data breaches, insider threats, and unknown threats early on. Identifying and responding to these threats in real-time is crucial for a strong cyber security strategy.
• Improved SOC Operational Efficiency – NDR solutions help Security Operations Center (SOC) teams by automating routine tasks and providing useful insights. This reduces alert fatigue and boosts productivity. To identify network technologies, teams can focus on the most serious incidents and respond effectively to major threats. This improves their response times to incidents and improves efficiency, allowing the security teams to devote more time to strategic initiatives and proactive threat hunting.
• Real-time Attack Response – The real-time capabilities of NDR are cardinal ineffective attack response. It allows the organization to contain and mitigate damage rapidly upon detection of threats while they are still unraveling. Whether malignant traffic blocking, review network, isolation of compromised systems, or threats neutralization, NDR avails the necessary tools to respond decisively. This proactive approach immensely reduces the impact of cyber-attacks and protects critical assets.
• Scalability and Flexibility – NDR solutions are flexible; they adapt to the evolving threat landscape and the growth of an organization. They scale to accommodate increasing network traffic and data volumes, ensuring that security remains robust as demands expand. In addition, the flexibility and ability to integrate with earlier installed security infrastructure qualify NDR tools for total and unique visibility into threat detection and response. This adaptability for network insights is important in ensuring that institutions can retain a robust security posture as their businesses continue changing. NDR threat detection and response solutions go a long way in ensuring that organizations are empowered enough to improve the detection, response, and recovery from cyber-attacks.

NDR vs EDR

While a network detection and response solution monitors your network traffic, an endpoint detection and response solution looks for suspicious activity across your computers, mobile devices, servers, and other endpoints. If an EDR solution identifies suspicious endpoint activity, it notifies users. Also, an EDR solution can address endpoint attacks and provide analytics that can help you optimize your endpoint protection.

NDR vs MDR

Network detection and response is a subset of managed detection and response (MDR), which lets you outsource your threat detection and response capabilities to a managed security services provider (MSSP). With an MDR solution, an MSSP hunts for, monitors, and responds to cyber threats across your IT infrastructure. Your MSSP can address threats on its own or work with you to resolve such issues any time they come up.

NDR vs XDR

An extended detection and response (XDR) solution provides visibility into your network, endpoint, and cloud data. At the same time, the solution lets you automatically detect and remediate attacks across your IT infrastructure. It also offers analytics to help you stay up to date with current and emerging threats.

How does Network Detection and Response enhance your security?

Traditional network security solutions are often detection-focused and use signature-based detection capabilities. Both of these are liabilities when protecting the enterprise against modern cyber threats.

The signature-based detection schemes used in many legacy security solutions, such as traditional antivirus and intrusion detection systems (IDSs), are no longer effective at detecting modern threats. Cybercriminals commonly use malware designed to differ from one campaign to another, meaning that signatures are outdated as soon as they are generated. An NDR solution uses advanced AI detection capabilities to identify and respond to even novel cyber threats, for which signatures do not yet exist.

NDR provides visibility inside the enterprise network, allowing analysts to determine affected assets and to correlate their anomalous behavior, yielding indicators for the attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures. Indicators are used to disrupt and contain the attacks, and to guide damage assessment and recovery operations.

Conclusion

NDR provides organizations with greater visibility into their network traffic and the ability to automatically identify and remediate network threats. With the ability to automatically identify and respond to malicious network traffic, companies dramatically reduce the risk that attackers will gain access to their environment or be able to cause significant damage to the business.

NDR plays a crucial role in an organization’s cyber security strategy. Over time, deploying AI-enhanced security will become even more essential to protecting against advanced threats and maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements. NDR can dramatically enhance your organization’s network security. Evaluate your business’s need and readiness for NDR today.