Using IBM Security ReaQta as Your EDR Solution

EDR solutions such as IBM Security ReaQta can assist security teams in identifying “early warning signs” as cyber attackers become skilled in avoiding detection and rapidly encrypting the data of organizations.

As attackers become more rapid and elusive, it has become challenging to navigate a constantly changing threat landscape. Based on the IBM Security ReaQta Threat Intelligence Index 2023 report, the time taken by attackers to execute ransomware attacks has decreased by 94% over the last few years, with what used to take months now taking only a few days. As a result, organizations must adopt a proactive strategy to keep up with the increasing speed of attackers.

The problem: Endpoint detection challenges in cybersecurity using IBM Security ReaQta

The post-pandemic rise in remote work patterns has caused rapid growth and interconnection of endpoints, resulting in a unique set of cybersecurity issues. This new way of working has resulted in a surge in advanced threat activity, and security teams have had to deal with an increased number of alerts to investigate. Unfortunately, many of these alerts turn out to be false positives, leading to significant alert fatigue.

Security teams that are already stretched thin are left with minimal time to respond, making it difficult to protect endpoints from advanced zero-day threats. Without the appropriate endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, preventing costly business delays can be challenging.

The fix: Amplifying your cybersecurity with EDR solutions using IBM Security ReaQta

To provide a prompt and effective response, security teams must implement a robust endpoint security solution. This is because endpoint protection plays a crucial role in containing threats before devices are infected or encrypted by ransomware. Additionally, it offers support throughout various stages of the incident response process and fills in gaps left by traditional antivirus solutions by providing enhanced detection, visibility, and control, preventing widespread malware or ransomware damage.

The need: Accelerating your response to threats and improving efficiency within the SOC teams

Rapid detection of endpoint threats and malware reporting can significantly minimize the impact of an attack, leading to significant savings in terms of time and expenses. To develop efficient responses to cyberattacks, defenders can leverage EDR tools to achieve the following:

1. Leverage AI and security automation to speed response to threats.
2. Improve efficiency within the Ops teams to save both time and expenses.
3. Get high-fidelity alerts that help reduce analyst workloads.
4. Gain deep visibility into all processes and applications running on all endpoint devices.

IBM Security ReaQta is a sophisticated and user-friendly EDR solution that can aid in all of these areas. Let’s explore how it works.

1. Leverage AI and security automation to speed response to threats using IBM Security ReaQta

By utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology, ReaQta provides a high degree of automation in detecting and addressing endpoint threats. It can swiftly identify and resolve both known and unknown threats or fileless attacks in near real time. To gain a better understanding of ReaQta’s malware detection and automated response capabilities, let’s take a closer look at how it functions.

ReaQta dashboard

IBM Security ReaQta provides an alert overview of your endpoint ecosystem.

The ReaQta dashboard is intentionally designed to be simple and straightforward, in contrast to other complex dashboards. It provides a minimalist and user-friendly interface that makes it easy to use. The home screen displays a comprehensive summary of alerts, indicating the status of all endpoint devices.

An alert is triggered

The behavioral tree triggers an alert on detecting any anomalies.

IBM Security ReaQta promptly detects anomalous activities such as ransomware behavior. If any abnormal behavior is detected, the system generates an automatic alert. The severity of the alert, which in this case is medium, is displayed in the upper left corner of the screen. The right side of the screen provides additional information about the alert, such as the cause of the trigger point, the affected endpoints, and how the threat is linked to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

Investigating the alert

Security teams can quickly analyze if the threat is malicious or benign by clicking Alert details.

Analysts can quickly assess whether a threat is malicious or benign and determine if it is a false positive by clicking on the alert details page. This speeds up the response process and reduces alert fatigue, as analysts do not need to waste time and effort sifting through extensive event logs to pinpoint the source of the problem.

A visual storyline is automatically created as an attack unfolds.

Whenever an alert is generated, a behavior tree is constructed, offering complete visibility into the alert and attack. This user-friendly and visually compelling narrative presents a chronological timeline of the attack, including the applications and behaviors that triggered the alert and how the attack unfolded. Security teams can easily access a comprehensive overview of the threat activity on a single screen, enabling them to make quick decisions.

Detailed behavioral analytics and full attack visibility

Full attack visibility ensures analysts understand the scope of the attack and respond accordingly.

Detailed information about the launched applications is available by clicking on the circles in the behavioral tree function. Although nothing may appear suspicious at this stage, some attacks initiated through signed applications may elude antivirus or firewall software.

Simple behavior tree visualization for alert prioritization

Analysts can easily prioritize their search when looking for an alert.

To expedite analysts’ examination, ReaQta presents the threat activity through an uncomplicated behavior tree representation using circles and hexagons. Circles represent applications, while hexagons denote behaviors. Each shape has a different color: red indicates high risk, orange indicates medium risk, and yellow indicates low risk. These colors indicate the severity and assist security teams in prioritizing their search when investigating an alert.

2. Improving efficiency within the operations teams with IBM Security ReaQta

The use of EDR security tools such as ReaQta can enhance the operational efficiency of security teams by allowing for swift and efficient threat remediation, process termination, and isolation of infected devices. In addition, ReaQta supports forensic analysis and reconstruction of the root cause of the attack, enabling operations teams to quickly remediate threats and restore business continuity.

Remediating and isolating threats with IBM Security ReaQta

Quick view showing how many other endpoints were affected by the malicious activity.

After identifying a malicious threat, analysts can use ReaQta to quickly respond and protect the system. They can access containment controls to triage the threat and create a blocklist policy that prevents the threat from running on other endpoints.

By checking the number of compromised endpoints, security teams can determine whether the threat has been isolated or is recurring. They can terminate the threats and isolate infected endpoints from the network, regardless of their location, such as Singapore, the U.S., the UK, Africa, and so on. If the endpoint is connected to the server, the malware can be terminated and added to the blocklist in real time.

Preventing similar threats in the future

Analysts can create workflows to counteract similar threats.

With ReaQta, you can establish workflows that target specific threats, which can be automatically activated when a similar threat is detected in the future.

As part of the remediation plan, ReaQta offers the ability to choose and remove any dropped executables, filesystem, or registry persistence. Users can also select which endpoints to isolate and then close the alert.

3. Get high-fidelity alerts that help reduce analyst workloads

ReaQta is capable of producing alerts of high quality and can help in reducing investigation time from minutes to seconds by utilizing threat intelligence and analysis scoring. Analysts can quickly identify potential cyber threats by utilizing the metadata-based analysis to speed up triage. Additionally, ReaQta’s threat-hunting capabilities enable real-time infrastructure-wide searches for indicators of compromise (IOC), behaviors, and binaries.

Threat classification to help reduce false positives

Cyber Assistant learns from analyst decisions and helps reduce alert fatigue.

After closing an alert, it is crucial for the analyst to determine whether the threat was malicious or benign as Cyber Assistant, an AI-based alert management system within the endpoint protection platform, constantly learns from the analyst’s actions.

The system gathers data and applies AI algorithms to constantly learn from threat patterns and identify similar threats. If a new threat exhibits telemetry above 85% similarity to a known threat, it leverages its learned behaviors to classify the new threat accordingly.

The knowledge gained by Cyber Assistant helps to decrease the number of false positives. As a result, it improves the accuracy of high alerts and reduces the workload of analysts, thereby minimizing alert fatigue and enhancing the efficiency of security teams.

4. Gain deep visibility into all processes and applications running on all endpoint devices

The NanoOS is a lightweight agent that operates at the hypervisor layer outside of the operating systems. It is intentionally designed to be undetectable, making it impervious to modifications, shutdowns, or replacements by malware or attackers.

NanoOS, which sits in the hypervisor layer and is undetectable, can be leveraged by security teams to covertly track the movements of attackers to comprehend their goals until the security team terminates their access. Once this is done, the ReaQta security solution can be implemented to remediate compromised devices without any disruption.

Conclusion

IBM Security ReaQta is an effective endpoint security solution that helps cybersecurity teams identify vulnerabilities. Although endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions are not the only protection mechanism for threat detection, they should be the first mechanism, along with an extended detection and response (XDR) security solution, to identify suspicious behavior.

IBM Security ReaQta seamlessly integrates with QRadar SIEM, enabling organizations to have a more secure defense system that unifies protect, detect, and response capabilities, thereby improving their IT security against advanced cyberattacks.

ReaQta also offers a 24×7 managed detection and response (MDR) service that serves as an extension of your security team, ensuring that endpoint threats are contained and remediated as soon as they are detected.

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