5 Situations When Managed Detection and Response Becomes Invaluable

Managed detection and response services keep attacks at bay to help improve your security posture. In this blog, we’ll take a look at five security risks where managed detection and response will demonstrate immediate value. 

Like it or not, security threats are now an expected part of business.

With so many data security problems discovered only after it’s too late, it’s time to take advantage of managed detection and response services to keep attacks at bay. 

In this blog, we’ll take a look at five typical security risks where managed detection and response will demonstrate immediate value. 

1. Detection of phishing attacks. 
   Phishing is a perennial problem, and today’s uncertainty due to COVID-19 has made it even more prolific. With most phishing attacks coming via email by enticing people to “open a file or click on a link”, a good managed detection and response service will integrate both network and local email threat protection. 
   
   An email gateway protection service will stop most malicious emails (or at least quarantine them) and this should be backed up by local antivirus, firewalling and intrusion prevention systems. 
   
   Security as a service can enable advanced heuristics and URL monitoring and detection, and these contribute to reducing the overall risk.
   
   
2. BEC threat mitigation.
   Business email compromise (BEC) threats are generally more targeted than mass phishing, and often involve information harvested from social media searches. 
   
   A BEC attack typically happens when someone in the business has their display name shown as a managing director or CEO. The fraudulent email will be similar, but not exactly the same, so it can be used to impersonate that person for malicious purposes.  
   
   A managed detection and response service will notify an end-user and IT with the appropriate warning tags, so all can see that there’s an attack is going on. The next step is to block the domain or delete the emails.
   
   The tooling for BEC mitigation is now a lot better than it used to be and it allows organisations to identify key roles in the business that are most likely to be targets. Turning on monitoring significantly reduces the likelihood of attack.
   
   
3. Password management.
   Another area of security which can be vastly improved with better management is passwords. Managed detection and response can provide reports of accounts used in a domain and any known compromises.
   
   Reports on how end-users in your environment might be impacted by a compromise can help you to be proactive with passwords, and if someone’s account has been compromised and appears in a public database a customer can be notified and changes to passwords actioned.
   
   
4. Threat management.
   Staying ahead of threats via monitoring of web, firewall and wireless is not easy.
   
   A managed detection and response service reports on issues found in an environment, including anomalies such as a large amount of network traffic coming from an unknown source. This may well be from countries your organisation has nothing to do with.
   
   Fine-grained options include locking down cloud services all the way to specific IP addresses. In the case of wireless, statistics monitoring will determine if there is a device within your corporate network to detect any rogue IPs.
   
   
5. Advanced threat protection.
   Advanced threat protection goes further than profiling network-born threats to include how end-users interact with data – both where, and how.
   
   A cloud access security broker (CASB) system can determine how cloud data is used and protect data before it’s sent outside the organisation. 
   
   For example, such tooling can make associations with people exporting data from a corporate SharePoint and putting it up to a personal OneDrive account. Knowing where company data is in the cloud is the essence of cloud security. 
   
   Unified threat management systems can show traffic flow and perform dynamic profiling and threat detection. This takes the little pieces and collates the information in a way as to be alerted to something going wrong. 
   
   For example, with Active Directory monitoring, you can gain a clear idea if someone has made a mass modification of user accounts, deleted files or made everyone a domain admin. This type of activity would come up as an alert. 
   
   When it comes to managed detection and response, the MSP model works well because there are so many components required to do it properly.
   
   A managed security provider such as Tecala can take away the technical nature and deliver advanced threat management in a way that is much easier for an organisation to consume.
   
   As a result you can relax, knowing that shady threats can be identified – and thwarted – before they can do harm.