Bitdefender Launches GravityZone Extended Detection and Response (XDR) to Improve Cyber Resilience

Bitdefender has a robust 20-year history innovating on behalf of our customers for superior protection, detection and response against the ever-increasing and evolving threat of cyberattacks.

From introducing our first machine learning-based detection in 2009, the first use of deep learning to increase detection rates in 2014 and our agentless tunable machine learning capabilities delivered in 2018, we have always focused on providing the highest efficacy of prevention and detection for our customers with the least amount of effort required for already burdened security and IT teams.

We focus our R&D efforts on providing the best technology to our customers and partners so that they can stay one step ahead – and today, we continue to deliver on that effort.

The evolution of detection and response

Today, we announced the general availability of Bitdefender GravityZone XDR (Extended Detection and Response), a native XDR solution designed with our pioneering mindset of solving real customer problems with the least amount of effort required.

GravityZone XDR analyzes and detects attacks across an organization's infrastructure and applications with more accurate detection and rapid response. Bringing endpoint, cloud, identity, network and productivity application data to the GravityZone platform expands visibility far beyond just managed endpoints.

It combines advanced threat protection with out-of-the-box analytics and rich security context for correlation of disparate alerts, quick triage of incidents, and attack containment through automated and guided response. The built-in analytics provide detection algorithms both locally where the data resides and in the GravityZone cloud analytics platform for correlation across data sources to ensure high fidelity of detections. It exposes the full scope of the attack by connecting events and incidents over time and delivering deeper context through automated evidence collection, root cause analysis and recommended response actions.

As a native XDR solution, GravityZone XDR is a straightforward evolution of our traditional EDR capabilities combining out of the box integrations with additional non-endpoint telemetry ready to be consumed upon set up.

What makes our XDR approach unique?

GravityZone XDR was built from the ground up to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of security teams, minimize attacker dwell time, and enable cyber resilience. We deliver on this goal by:

Unifying events and incidents across disparate security tool silos
Providing built-in machine learning for proven detection and low false-positive rates
Providing root cause analysis and context to facilitate rapid investigations
Enabling guided and automated response across security controls

We designed our XDR solution from the ground up with our customers by our side to ensure we were building a product that would help them gain efficiencies in detecting and responding to threats from across their environment. We believe XDR isn't about lazily bundling raw data into a data lake and forcing analysts to trawl through that data to discover a needle in the needlestack.

According to our Group Product Manager, Daniel Daraban, who worked hand- in-hand with our early access customers, “At Bitdefender, we strongly believe in customer-driven solutions. This results in a better understanding of the day-to-day struggles faced by security teams and grants us the unique opportunity to plan our roadmap to alleviate them. GravityZone XDR represents the outcome of our relentless focus on innovation, efficiency and direct customer engagement, moving toward a future where security teams no longer have to choose between investigating countless incidents and investigating the right incident.”

How XDR improves MDR

Whether customers have one security analyst, twenty or one hundred, we believe XDR should be attainable for any organization – with an intuitive design and a strong focus on ease of use – plus available through our MDR (Managed Detection and Response) service for organizations that would like our assistance in augmenting their team with 24x7 security operations.

Daniel Clayton, Vice President Services and Support at Bitdefender shared, “Today’s adversaries are able to target businesses in many ways. They use social media to socially engineer employees and they constantly evolve their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) and exploit new technology platforms and infrastructure that we introduce into our environments. Modern security operations rely on a combination of context, expertise and intuition to identify malicious activity that can evade many security tools. GravityZone XDR significantly expands the context available to our Bitdefender SOC cyber threat hunters, provides a more detailed understanding of what ‘normal’ looks like in the environments we defend and enables our MDR team to win against malicious actors in the cyber battle space – which is what our managed services customers are looking for us to assist them with.”

We have built the GravityZone platform for resilience with the detection, investigation, and response capabilities needed to stay one step ahead of the attackers. GravityZone XDR is a cloud-delivered solution for organizations that want to run and operate their security operations in-house. For organizations looking for a managed service, Bitdefender MDR, leveraging GravityZone XDR, keeps organizations safe by providing 24x7 continuous monitoring, threat analysis, and response with intelligence-driven threat hunting at scale with a fast time to value through mature processes and a white-glove security outcome-focused approach.