The Security Operations Center (SOC) team faces fundamentally new challenges. Traditional cybersecurity tools are unable to detect advanced enemies who have become experts in circumventing endpoint-based defense and signature-based detection systems. The reality of these “invisible intruders” promotes the critical need for multilayered approaches to threat detection, such as network detection and response (NDR) solutions.
The problem of invisible intruders
Imagine your network being compromised – not today or yesterday, but a few months ago. Despite the heavily invested in security tools that run 24/7, advanced enemies are quietly moving the system and carefully avoiding detection. They showed nothing but green, but their qualifications were stolen, established a backdoor and ruled out any sensitive data drawn.
This scenario is not a hypothetical. The average residence time of an attacker – the period between initial compromise and detection – takes up around 21 days in many industries, with some violations remaining undiscovered for years.
“We hear this story over and over from our security team,” said Vince Stoffer, field CTO at CoreLight, the fastest growing provider of NDR solutions. “They install NDR solutions and quickly discover basic network visibility issues or suspicious activities that have not been discovered in the network for several months. Sometimes the enemy conducts reconnaissance, establishes persistence, creates lateral movement, and is below the detection capabilities of existing security stacks.”
The problem lies in how modern attackers behave. Today’s sophisticated threat actors do not rely on malware with known signatures or behaviors that trigger endpoint alerts. Instead, they:
- Use Living-the-Land the Land Technique with legitimate system tools like PowerShell
- Move the network sideways using stolen but valid credentials
- Communicate over an encrypted channel
- Carefully time their activities to blend with normal business operations.
- Take advantage of trustworthy relationships between systems
These techniques specifically target blind spots of traditional security approaches, focusing on known indicators of compromise. Signature-based detection and endpoint monitoring were not designed primarily to capture enemies operating within legitimate processes and authentication sessions.
How can NDR deal with these invisible intruders and help security teams regain control of their systems?
What is network detection and response?
NDR represents the evolution of network security surveillance that complements a wider security stack, beyond traditional intrusion detection systems. At the core, NDR solutions capture and analyze raw network traffic and metadata to detect malicious activity, security anomalies, and protocol violations that other security tools may miss.
Unlike legacy network security tools that relied primarily on the signature of known threats, modern NDRs incorporate multi-layer detection strategies.
- Behavioral analysis to identify abnormal patterns of network traffic
- Machine learning models that establish baseline and flag deviations
- Protocol analysis that understands the “conversations” happening between systems
- Threat intelligence integration to identify known malicious metrics
- Advanced analytical capabilities for retrospective threat hunting
The “response” element is equally important. The NDR platform provides detailed forensic data for investigations, and often includes the ability to quickly contain threats, with the ability to automate or guided response actions.
Why SOC Teams Accept NDR
The shift to NDR comes from several fundamental changes in the security environment that have changed the way organizations approach threat detection.
1. Rapidly expand and diversify attack surfaces
Modern enterprise environments have become exponentially more complicated, along with cloud adoption, containerization, IoT proliferation, and hybrid working models. This extension has created important visibility challenges, particularly due to the lateral movement (east-west traffic) across the environment that traditional boundary focus tools may overlook. NDR provides comprehensive, normalized visibility in these diverse environments, consolidating on-premises, cloud, and multi-cloud infrastructure monitoring under one analytics umbrella.
2. Privacy-centric technology evolution
The widespread adoption of encryption has fundamentally changed security surveillance. The traditional inspection approach has become ineffective as more than 90% of web traffic is now encrypted. Advanced NDR solutions evolve to analyse encrypted, encrypted traffic patterns and maintain security visibility while respecting privacy through metadata analysis, JA3/JA3S fingerprinting, and other technologies that do not need to break encryption.
3. Unmanageable devices proliferation
From IoT sensors to operational technology, the explosion of connected devices has created environments where traditional agent-based security is unrealistic or impossible. NDR’s agentless approach addresses security blind spots that increasingly dominate modern networks, providing visibility to devices that cannot deploy endpoint solutions and increasingly dominates the modern network as device types increase faster than security teams can manage them.
4. Complementary detection approach
The SOC team recognizes that different security technologies are excellent at detecting different types of threats. While EDR is good at detecting process-level activity on managed endpoints, NDR monitors network traffic and monitors objective records of communications that are difficult for attackers to manipulate or erase. You can modify the logs and disable endpoint telemetry, but network communications must occur for the attacker to achieve the target. This “ground truth” quality makes network data particularly valuable for threat detection and forensic investigation. This complementary approach closes the important visibility gaps that attackers exploit.
5. Cybersecurity workforce crisis
The global shortage of security experts (over 3.5 million unfilled positions) has led organizations to adopt technologies that maximize analyst effectiveness. NDR helps address this talent gap by reducing alert fatigue and providing high fidelity detection in a rich context that accelerates the investigation process. By integrating relevant activities and providing a comprehensive view of potential attack sequences, NDR reduces the cognitive load of already stretched security teams and allows them to handle more incidents with existing staff.
6. The evolving regulatory environment
Organizations face increasingly stringent compliance requirements with shorter reporting time frames. Regulations such as the GDPR, CCPA, NIS2, and industry-specific frameworks require prompt incident notification (often within 72 hours) and require detailed forensic evidence. The NDR solution provides the comprehensive audit trail and forensic data needed to meet these requirements, enabling organizations to demonstrate due diligence and provide the documentation they need for regulatory reporting. This data is also important in helping security teams to confidently state that threats are completely trapped and mitigated, and to help attackers understand the true scope and scale of what they touched while in their network.
The future of NDR
Adoption of NDR continues to accelerate as more organizations recognize the limitations of traditional security approaches. NDR innovations are moving rapidly to go ahead of attackers, but key features of NDR solutions must include:
- Cloud-native solutions that provide visibility across multi-cloud environments
- Integration with the SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) Platform for Streamlined Workflows
- Advanced analytical capabilities for aggressive threat hunting
- Open architectures that promote integration with a broader security ecosystem
For SOC teams dealing with increasingly complex threats, NDR is not just another security tool, but a fundamental feature that provides the visibility needed to detect and respond to today’s sophisticated attackers. While there is no single technology that can solve all security challenges, NDR deals with critical blind spots that have been repeatedly exploited in major violations.
As the surface of attack continues to expand and grow more creatively about how enemies penetrate a safe environment, the ability to see and understand network communications has become essential for organizations that take security seriously. After all, the network doesn’t lie. And the truth is that it has become invaluable in an era when deception is the main strategy of attackers.
Based on the open source Zeek network monitoring platform, CoreLight provides elite defenders of all shapes and sizes with the tools and resources they need to ensure comprehensive network visibility and advanced NDR capabilities. For more information, visit CoreLight.com.
