Imagine your network as a bustling city at night, where data moves like cars through countless intersections. Just like hidden criminals blending into traffic, cyber attackers hide among legitimate activity, making them nearly impossible to spot with traditional defenses alone.
According to a 2023 Cisco Security report, the average dwell time is about how long attackers remain undetected in a network was over 200 days, giving them months to steal data or cause catastrophic damage. Network Detection and Response (NDR) acts like an intelligent surveillance system, continuously analyzing traffic patterns to detect anomalies and suspicious behaviors that firewalls and antivirus solutions often miss.
What is Network Detection and Response?
Network Detection and Response (NDR) is an advanced cybersecurity solution that continuously monitors network traffic to detect, analyze, and respond to suspicious activities and potential threats. Unlike traditional security tools that rely on signature-based detection, NDR uses technologies such as machine learning, behavioral analytics, and threat intelligence to identify unknown, or zero-day threats hidden within network data.
NDR works by collecting metadata and packet data from across an organization’s network, then analyzing this information to spot anomalies or malicious behavior that might be undetected. Once a threat is detected, NDR platforms can automatically trigger alerts, recommend response actions, or integrate with other security systems to contain and remediate risk as well as enhancing security posture.
What Challenges Does NDR Solve?
NDR addresses several critical security challenges faced by modern companies.
Detecting Unknown and Sophisticated Threats
Traditional tools often fail to spot advanced threats like zero-day exploits or lateral movement. NDR leverages AI and behavioral analysis to identify these threats in real-time.
Visibility Across Complex Environments
With hybrid networks, IoT, and cloud services, it’s harder to see what’s happening. NDR provides full network visibility to help security teams detect risks anywhere data travels.
Reducing Response Time
By automating detection and correlating network data, NDR cuts down the time needed to investigate and respond to incidents, including critical for stopping breaches before it escalates.
Detecting Insider Threats and Anomalies
NDR can uncover subtle deviations in user or device behavior that is a signal for insider threats or compromised accounts.
Why Company Fails to Implement NDR?
Some companies are struggling to adopt NDR effectively due to several reasons.
Resource and Skill Gaps
Deploying and managing NDR solutions requires expertise in network analytics and security operations, which becomes lacking for many companies.
Data Overload
Without clear policies or integration with existing tools, NDR can generate large volumes of alerts, leading to alert fatigue and missed critical incidents.
Integration Complexity
Companies can find it challenging to integrate NDR seamlessly with their existing ecosystem such as SIEM, EDR, and others.
Underestimating Need
Some companies wrongly believe their parameter defenses or endpoint security are sufficient, overlooking the value of network-level detection.
Benefits of NDR
Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions deliver real-time visibility across network traffic, enabling companies to detect advanced and hidden threats that bypass traditional security tools. By continuously monitoring traffic, NDR helps identify anomalies, lateral movement, and suspicious behaviors that indicate potential breaches from zero-day attacks or insider threats.
Another major benefit is accelerated incident response. NDR can automatically correlate alerts, prioritize high-risk incidents, and provide actionable insights to help security teams respond and reduce dwell time of threats within the network. This proactive approach minimizes the impact of cyberattacks and supports compliance efforts by maintaining continuous security monitoring.
What to Look for in an NDR Solution?
When choosing an NDR solution, prioritize platforms that offer advanced AI and Machine Learning capabilities to detect unknown and emerging threats through behavior analysis rather than relying solely on known signatures. AI-driven analytics increase accuracy and reduce false positives to help your team focus more on real threats.
Look for deep visibility across all network layers, including encrypted traffic, and the ability to analyze real-time and historical data to detect stealthy attacks. Seamless integration with existing security infrastructure, such as SIEM, SOAR, and firewalls, is crucial for efficient response workflows and threat hunting.
ExtraHop NDR is the solution that provides automated response with an intuitive dashboard to empower security teams to act quickly and confidently.
Recommendation: ExtraHop NDR
ExtraHop NDR offers a unique combination of speed, depth, and visibility to redefine network security. Here is how ExtraHop NDR works.
TLS Decryption
Line-rate decryption of TLS encrypted traffic, including modern SSL/TLS 1.3 sessions is one of ExtraHop most compelling differentiator. Using key-based decryption and different from traditional solutions that offload decryption to separate appliances, ExtraHop decrypts traffic in real-time. This makes it possible to detect threats hidden in encrypted east-west traffic, which is often overlooked by conventional security tools but frequently exploited by attackers for lateral movement.
Protocol Fluency
Beyond simple port and protocol analysis, ExtraHop is protocol-aware and deeply understands ver 70 enterprises protocols like HTTP/2, SMBv3, DNS, LDAP, and Kerberos. This protocol fluency enables ExtraHop to parse, decode, and contextualize communications at a granular level. As a result, it can identify subtle attacker behaviors, abnormal patterns, and command-and-control activities that blend into legitimate network traffic, those where threats that traditional tools typically miss.
Auto Discovery & Classification (Agentless)
ExtraHop operates agentlessly, using passive network monitoring to automatically discover and classify every device on the network, including servers, IoT, devices, cloud workloads, and BYOD endpoints. By continuously updating assets inventories and understanding normal behavior baselines, ExtraHop empowers security teams to see and secure their entire environment in real-time, without complexity of deploying and managing endpoint agents.
Features and Benefits of ExtraHop NDR
ExtraHop NDR provides a powerful, AI-driven solution to help organizations detect, investigate, and respond to threats across the entire network. Here are three main benefits of ExtraHop NDR.
Investigate Smarter
Accelerate your mean time to investigate (MTTI) by combining cloud-scale machine learning with advanced forensic analysis. High-fidelity detections help security teams pinpoint real risks quickly, while streamlined investigation workflows for easier trace threats from the core data center to the network edge and across multi-cloud environments. This efficiency can speed up investigation and empower teams to focus on stopping attacks before they spread.
Stop Threats Faster
Modern attacks often exploit encrypted traffic, unmanaged devices, and workloads outside the reach of traditional security tools. ExtraHop NDR overcomes these blind spots by providing deep visibility without requiring endpoint agents. Its full packet capture and line-rate decryption enable detection of early-stage, subtle threats, including living-off-the-land attacks that use legitimate tools to move laterally within your environment. This proactive detection capability helps security teams act before threats escalate into breaches.
Move at the Speed of Risk
Organizations can continuously identify hidden risks and apply real-time controls for rich insights into vulnerabilities and security hygiene. This helps security teams make smarter, data-driven decisions, strengthen compliance reporting, and build a more resilient security posture. This adaptability keeps security aligned with dynamic business needs, even as risk landscapes evolve.
With the strong benefits, ExtraHop NDR comes with some key features below:
- Complete Network Visibility: see across your entire attack surface, including visibility through endpoints, logs, or older NDR tools to make sure that there is no hidden threats.
- Cloud-Scale Machine Learning: analyze massive volumes of data without sacrificing performance, using advanced behavioral analytics to detect threats and automate investigative steps.
- Real-time Threat Detection: leverage a hybrid approach of machine learning and signature-based techniques to catch known and unknown threats, even evade traditional defenses.
- Streamlined Investigation: trace incidents from detection to root cause with intuitive AI-driven workflows that reduce analyst workload and improve accuracy.
- Intelligent Response: take immediate, informed action with automated responses or guided analyst decisions, integrated seamlessly with your existing stack including SIEM, SOAR, and other tools.
Read More: Network Detection and Respons (NDR): Solusi Ampuh Deteksi Ancaman Jaringan
Get ExtraHop NDR Solution Only at Virtus
Virtus Technology Indonesia (VTI) as part of CTI Group, offers ExtraHop as Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions to help companies detect, analyze, and respond to suspicious activities and potential threats. Supported by experienced and certified IT experts, Virtus ensures that every solution is implemented by global standards and industry best practices.
It is time to identify unknown, or zero-day threats hidden within network data to your company now! Contact the Virtus team by clicking here link to start consultation with our team to help you implement NDR solutions without trial and error.
Author: Ervina Anggraini – CTI Group Content Writer
