Breaking Down the Real Meaning of an XDR Solution
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Discover why is EDR not enough and how XDR provides comprehensive threat
Traditional endpoint defenses that rely solely on signatures and alerts often miss stealthy, livingofftheland attacks—studies indicate that as many as 90% of breaches begin at the endpoint and over twothirds of organizations suffer successful endpoint incursions. When these threats go undetected, they can dwell for months, resulting in data exfiltration, regulatory fines, and lasting reputational damage. Proactive endpoint threat hunting changes the game by applying intelligencedriven hypotheses against rich telemetry to uncover and neutralize hidden adversaries before they strike.
In this blog, you will explore why threat hunting is a musthave, and how to transform your security with proactive endpoint threat hunting: uncover stealthy attacks, cut dwell times, and streamline investigations.
Traditional, signaturebased security stacks are blind to many modern attack tactics, leaving stealthy intruders free to roam your network undetected. Proactive endpoint threat hunting fills these gaps by seeking out hidden adversaries before they can inflict damage. The following four imperatives explain why you can’t afford to skip this critical layer of defense—and exactly what your team will gain when you put hunting at the heart of your security program.
Modern adversaries rarely deliver a neat, signaturedetectable payload. Instead, they abuse builtin OS tooling—PowerShell scripts, WMIC calls, scheduled tasks—to move laterally and exfiltrate data under the guise of routine processes. Without an active hunt program, these “normal” operations go unquestioned.
Industry studies put the average breach dwell time at more than 80 days—each extra day inflates cleanup bills, ransom demands, and regulatory liabilities. Left unchecked, hidden threats can burn through budgets and damage reputations.
Standards like PCIDSS, HIPAA, and GDPR no longer accept passive prevention alone—you must prove active detection and investigation of potential threats. A documented hunting program meets auditor expectations and shields you from hefty fines.
Every hunt surfaces new IOCs, attacker TTPs, and blind spots—yet many teams fail to feed those insights back into their defenses. A feedbackdriven hunting cycle hardens your environment over time.
When security teams lack a clear investigative framework, they end up chasing every alert in a sea of noise, missing genuinely dangerous intrusions hidden among false positives. By defining precise, intelligencebacked hypotheses before each hunt, you ensure every minute spent investigates the techniques adversaries actually use against your environment.
For example: You detect an unusual spike in failed Windows logons across multiple service accounts at offhours.
Because you start each hunt with a targeted question, your analysts avoid random log reviews and focus their efforts on scenarios most likely to harbor real compromises. This precision reduces alert fatigue and maximizes the chances of uncovering stealthy threats in the shortest possible time.
Outcome: By hunting with clear hypotheses, you rapidly surface hidden adversary activity while conserving analyst bandwidth for the deepest investigations.
Without an uptodate model of “normal” endpoint behavior, distinguishing malicious actions from routine processes becomes nearly impossible—and every anomaly risks being dismissed or overescalated. A living baseline that ingests continuous telemetry and adapts to organizational changes gives you an objective yardstick for detecting truly suspicious deviations.
For example: Your baseline shows PowerShell scripts running daily between 9 AM and 5 PM, but tonight a critical server launches PowerShell at 2 AM.
Because your baseline evolves with your environment, routine changes—like a new software deployment—don’t generate noise, while genuine anomalies immediately stand out. This approach lets your team investigate only what truly matters, dramatically cutting down on wasted time and ensuring malicious activity never hides in plain sight.
Outcome: With a dynamic baseline, your security posture becomes proactive: you catch threats the moment they diverge from expected behavior.
Endpoint data in isolation often lacks the context to reveal multistage attacks, as adversaries routinely blend process misuse with covert network activity to exfiltrate data or move laterally. By correlating EDR telemetry with NDR or unified XDR flows, you recreate the full kill chain and expose hidden links between host and network behavior.
For example: A suspicious rundll32.exe process spawns on Host A, and moments later you see an outbound SMB connection from Host B to an external IP.
This crosstelemetry correlation exposes stealthy lateral movements and exfiltration attempts that singlesource tools miss, turning disjointed alerts into cohesive attack narratives. Investigations become faster and more conclusive, with far fewer false positives distracting your team.
Outcome: By connecting the dots between host and network layers, you gain endtoend visibility into attacker behavior, ensuring no stage of the kill chain goes unnoticed.
With limited analyst resources, treating every device equally dilutes your efforts and leaves critical systems vulnerable; you must identify and focus on the endpoints whose compromise would cause the greatest business damage. By prioritizing your crownjewel assets—servers, privileged accounts, and sensitive data stores—you ensure that the most dangerous threats get hunted and neutralized first.
For example: Both a user’s laptop and your domain controller trigger alerts, but only the domain controller houses Active Directory credentials.
Concentrating on highvalue endpoints maximizes the return on your threathunting investment by uncovering the most critical compromises before attackers can leverage them. This focused approach reduces potential breach impact and supports data protection and compliance objectives.
Outcome: By hunting your crownjewel assets first, you prevent the worstcase scenarios and safeguard your organization’s most vital resources.
Relying on manual or infrequent updates to your indicator feeds leaves you trailing behind adversaries’ latest tactics, techniques, and procedures. Integrating real-time threat intelligence directly into your hunting workflows gives you the proactive edge to surface and investigate emerging threats before they take hold.
For example: A new ransomware variant is reported in threat advisories—are the associated file hashes and commandandcontrol domains already part of your hunting queries?
By feeding live intelligence into every hunt, you pivot immediately to investigate the latest campaigns and IOCs, rather than reacting to attacks only after they’ve breached your perimeter. This continuous update cycle ensures you’re always looking for the freshest threats.
Outcome: Proactive integration of realtime intel means you can detect, contain, and remediate emerging attacks at inception, rather than chasing them after damage is done.
When your analysts spend hours on repetitive alert triage—hash lookups, IP reputation checks, processtree analysis—the hunt slows down and critical tasks get backlogged. Automating these routine steps with scripted playbooks standardizes quality, accelerates mean time to detection, and frees your team to focus on deepdive investigations.
For example: A highpriority alert arrives and instead of manual lookup, a playbook automatically queries IOC databases, enriches the alert with threat context, and flags it for analyst review.
Automation eliminates human error in routine tasks, accelerates your investigative workflows, and guarantees that every alert has consistent enrichment before reaching your analysts. This consistency not only speeds detection but also improves the overall quality of your threat hunting outcomes.
Outcome: By automating triage, your team gains back valuable hours to devote to highvalue, complex threat analysis—dramatically boosting productivity and detection accuracy.
If your SOC, incident response, and IT operations teams each work in isolation, critical findings and contextual insights never get shared—slowing response and limiting program growth. Establishing collaborative workflows and shared knowledge repositories ensures every discovery benefits the entire security organization.
For example: SOC uncovers a suspicious script execution, and IR correlates it with a network beacon—yet without a shared platform, neither team sees the full picture in real time.
By fostering open communication and shared documentation, your teams break down silos and accelerate investigations, turning each hunt into a learning opportunity that informs the next one. This ongoing feedback loop continuously strengthens your overall security posture.
Outcome: A collaborative hunting culture empowers all team members to contribute expertise, creating a force multiplier that elevates detection speed and program maturity.
| Practice | Key Benefit |
|---|---|
| HypothesisDriven Hunts | Zero in on real threats, avoid alert fatigue |
| Dynamic Baseline | Instant anomaly detection with minimal noise |
| EndpointNetwork Correlation | Full context on lateral moves and data exfiltration |
| HighValue Asset Prioritization | Protect your most critical systems first |
| RealTime Threat Intelligence | Anticipate and investigate emerging threats |
| Automated Triage Playbooks | Faster MTTD, analysts focused on analysis |
| Collaborative Learning Culture | Continuous program improvement |
Fidelis Elevate’s Deep Session Inspection® ingests and reconstructs full sessions—across network, email, web, and encrypted traffic—at speeds up to 20 GB/s, revealing nested malware and livingofftheland behaviors. Its signal correlation engine aggregates EDR, NDR, and deception triggers, applies proprietary algorithms to map findings to MITRE ATT&CK, and filters noise to surface highconfidence threats. Builtin playbooks automate validation, enrichment, and response, cutting MTTR by up to 60%. Fidelis Elevate delivers a turnkey XDR that embeds each best practice into a unified, easily deployable platform.
| Feature | Fidelis Elevate (XDR) | Typical EDR/NDR |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | Unified network + endpoint + cloud telemetry | Endpoint-only or network-only view |
| Automation | Built-in analytics + automated SOAR playbooks | Manual triage; limited orchestration |
| Correlation | Cross-layer NDR+EDR alert linking | Siloed correlation (endpoint OR network) |
| Threat Detection | Deep session inspection, ML baselines, deception | Signature/IOC-only detection |
| Remediation Speed | Automated containment (endpoint isolation, blocks) | Slower, manual response |
Proactive endpoint threat hunting is your last line of defense against sophisticated adversaries. By adopting a hypothesisdriven process, maintaining dynamic baselines, correlating telemetry, prioritizing assets, leveraging fresh intelligence, automating tasks, and fostering a collaborative culture, you’ll transform your security posture from reactive to relentlessly proactive.
See Fidelis in action. Learn how our fast and scalable platforms provide full visibility, deep insights, and rapid response to help security teams across the World protect, detect, respond, and neutralize advanced cyber adversaries.