Achieving Proactive Threat Protection through Cortex XDR and Recorded Future

As cyber threats continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, organizations need robust security solutions that can provide comprehensive visibility, proactive threat detection, and rapid response capabilities. An integrated approach that bundles endpoint detection and response (EDR) with external threat intelligence can offer enhanced security outcomes.

Specifically, by bundling Cortex XDR and Recorded Future, organizations can benefit from enriched threat intelligence, proactive threat hunting, contextualized incident response, improved detection and response capabilities, and streamlined security operations.

Comprehensive Threat Intelligence

Recorded Future provides real-time, actionable threat intelligence powered by machine learning and natural language processing. This includes indicators of compromise (IOCs), emerging threats, vulnerabilities, risk scores, and contextual information on threat actors.

By integrating Recorded Future intelligence into Cortex XDR, organizations gain access to a vast collection of curated and validated external threat data. This enhances Cortex XDR’s on-endpoint capabilities with broader visibility into the threat landscape, empowering security teams to identify and prioritize the most critical threats.

Key benefits include:

• Early warning on emerging threats - Recorded Future continuously monitors open, deep, and dark web sources to detect threats before they spread. These early warnings on malware campaigns, zero days, and attacker infrastructure allow organizations to proactively harden defenses.
• Expanded IOC detection - Incorporating Recorded Future’s extensive repository of validated threat indicators (domains, IPs, hashes, CVEs etc.) enhances Cortex XDR’s ability to detect known bad entities across the environment.
• Accelerated response - Threat intelligence cards within Cortex XSOAR provide security teams the contextual background and risk profiles they need to confidently respond to threats detected by Cortex XDR.
• Prioritized vulnerability focus - Recorded Future risk scores help identify the most critical vulnerabilities for patching and prioritize remediation efforts.

By consuming Recorded Future’s comprehensive threat intelligence, Cortex XDR gains an external lens into the threat landscape that strengthens its endpoint detection and response capabilities.

Proactive Threat Hunting

Cortex XDR employs behavioral analytics, machine learning models, and automation to proactively hunt for advanced threats across endpoints. However, false positives can overwhelm security teams and cause alert fatigue.

By incorporating threat intelligence from Recorded Future, Cortex XDR can validate alerts and pinpoint anomalies that are high probability threats. This reduces false positives and enables analysts to hunt more accurately for the “needle in the haystack”.

Key benefits include:

• Higher fidelity alerts - Threat intelligence enrichment helps Cortex XDR correlate alerts with real threats, reducing false positives and focusing hunts.
• Detection of unknown threats - While Cortex XDR relies on machine learning models, Recorded Future’s natural language processing detects novel threats, filling detection gaps.
• Faster hunts - Context from Recorded Future enables Cortex XDR to quickly trace anomalies to compromised endpoints and identify root causes.
• Reduced alert fatigue - By using Recorded Future for alert validation, organizations can overcome alert fatigue. Analysts can focus on credible threats rather than churning through false positives.

The combination of Cortex XDR’s endpoint visibility and Recorded Future’s external threat context allows security teams to implement more effective threat hunting programs. Analysts gain confidence that the threats they are hunting are based on high-fidelity alerts with expanded intelligence.

Contextualized Incident Response

During security incidents, time is of the essence. However, gathering information from disconnected systems can create delays. Recorded Future integration provides Cortex XSOAR users access to enriched threat intelligence directly within the incident response workflow.

Key benefits include:

• Faster triage - Indicator lookups against Recorded Future instantly return risk profiles, giving analysts at-a-glance assessments of potential threats detected on endpoints.
• Improved prioritization - Criticality scores help analysts rapidly differentiate commodity threats from sophisticated targeted attacks to prioritize accordingly.
• Accelerated investigation - Entity relationship mapping shows connections to easily trace threats across endpoints and understand scope.
• Confident response - Threat intelligence cards equip analysts with holistic background to determine root causes and confidently select actions to neutralize threats.
• Orchestration of containment - Playbooks can automatically isolate infected endpoints based on Cortex XDR alerts validated through Recorded Future.

With Recorded Future threat intelligence integrated into Cortex XSOAR, analysts gain the insights and context for fast, informed decisions when responding to incidents. This allows for more targeted, effective actions to mitigate damage from attacks.

Improved Detection and Response Capabilities

While Cortex XDR provides powerful endpoint visibility and threat detection, its view is limited to the local environment. However, many threats originate from external sources outside the network perimeter.

Recorded Future complements Cortex XDR by tracking threats across open, deep, and dark web sources. This provides visibility where Cortex XDR lacks coverage, filling detection blind spots.

Together, integrated Cortex XDR and Recorded Future capabilities deliver improved threat detection and response across the kill chain:

• Greatly expanded threat visibility – Cortex XDR sees threats on endpoints, Recorded Future identifies threats externally pre-compromise.
• Enhanced real-time detection – Multi-sourced threat intelligence strengthens real-time detection of malicious activity on endpoints.
• Rapid investigation and response –Combined endpoint and threat context accelerates investigations to uncover attack scope.
• Proactive threat hunting –Real external threats detected by Recorded Future help focus threat hunts on highest probability threats.
• Prioritized vulnerability patching - Recorded Future risk scoring helps patch most critical software flaws before exploits.
• Coordinated enforcement – Global threat intelligence automates coordinated enforcement across endpoints by Cortex XDR.

With the combined scale of endpoint and external threat visibility, Cortex XDR and Recorded Future offer organizations integrated capabilities to enhance detection, investigations, threat hunting, and response.

Streamlined Security Operations

The integration between Cortex XDR and Recorded Future also streamlines security operations by enabling seamless sharing of threat data to accelerate workflows. Benefits include:

• Centralized threat visibility – Recorded Future integrates into the Cortex data lake to provide holistic visibility alongside Cortex XDR telemetry.
• Improved collaboration – Security teams have access to the same threat intelligence across functions, ensuring alignment.
• Consistent prioritization – Risk scoring from Recorded Future provides consistent threat prioritization across the organization.
• Automated enforcement – Global threat intelligence enables automated IOC blocking through Cortex XDR scripts and policies.
• Orchestrated response – Integrated playbooks and automation enable unified threat response across endpoints.
• Operational efficiency – Workflows are streamlined through bi-directional integration rather than manual processes.

With silos removed through close Cortex XDR and Recorded Future integration, security teams can align and take consistent action against the most critical threats. This results in improved workforce efficiency and operational speed.

Real-World Success Cases

The value of integrating Cortex XDR and Recorded Future has been demonstrated through real-world success cases:

• A financial services organization leveraged the integration to rapidly detect and remediate an active attack moving laterally on endpoints. Recorded Future provided real-time intelligence to contain infected hosts and eradicate the threat.
• A retail firm enriched Cortex XDR firewall data with Recorded Future threat context to uncover command and control traffic from an infostealer that had evaded other defenses. This allowed them to implement protections and prevent data exfiltration.
• A technology company combined insights from Cortex XDR endpoint events with threat intelligence from Recorded Future to proactively hunt for and eliminate a Trojan that was propagating via weaponized Excel docs.

These examples showcase how customers have realized measurable value from the combined capabilities of Cortex XDR and Recorded Future to improve threat outcomes.

Key Takeaways

In summary, key takeaways on the value derived from integrating Cortex XDR with Recorded Future include:

• Comprehensive threat intelligence enhances Cortex XDR’s endpoint visibility with broader context on threats in one data lake. This reduces blind spots.
• Proactive threat hunting powered by validated external intelligence helps overcome alert fatigue, focuses hunts, and enables threat removal at scale across endpoints.
• Context for accelerated incident response helps SOCs rapidly assess and respond to priority threats detected on endpoints.
• Combined endpoint and threat intelligence capabilities enhance detection, investigation, and response across kill chain stages.
• Tight integration streamlines security operations by eliminating silos and manual processes to boost efficiency.
• Customer success cases demonstrate measurable improvement in threat detection, response, and mitigation from the joint solution.

For organizations looking to get more from their endpoint security investment, bundling Cortex XDR with Recorded Future integration provides greater threat visibility, hunting, and response capabilities through a force multiplier effect of combined offerings.