An Overview of TDIR: Threat Detection and Incident Response

Originally published by Panther here.

Today, countless solutions support threat detection.

This is great news, but the market is saturated with different solutions and many different acronyms. One of the more recent acronyms to gain traction is threat detection and incident response (TDIR). This article will explore TDIR’s importance in the marketplace and what it means relative to other similar acronyms.

What is TDIR?

At a high level, threat detection and incident response is the process of identifying, assessing, and responding to threats.

TDIR platforms can be used to identify activity from malicious actors, unauthorized access and attacks, data breaches, and other incidents.

There are two obvious components of TDIR: threat detection and incident response.

Threat detection represents an organization’s ability to accurately identify threats to the network, any endpoint, asset, or application — including cloud-based infrastructure and assets. At scale, threat detection platforms need to collect and analyze data from the organization’s entire infrastructure to gain full visibility and identify malicious activity that could compromise the ecosystem.

Incident response represents a security team’s ability to investigate and respond to potentially harmful threats. Incident response (IR) teams ensure security issues are understood and fully resolved, and they carry out damage control for any system breach, malware exposure, data loss, or other security events. Teams rely on incident response tools to help manage the response process and investigate the impact of system security incidents. IR tools can help speed up the response process and assist with post-incident analysis.

According to Gartner, TDIR platforms commonly include security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities. Organizations can also use these tools for security-adjacent requirements such as log management and compliance reporting.

How TDIR has Evolved

As the threat landscape changes and the TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) used by attackers increase in complexity, detecting and responding to threats becomes a more significant challenge for security teams. After all, threat detection can be difficult, especially when attackers exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities or find new ways to evade common preventative measures. Exacerbating the challenge, security teams must act quickly to limit the damage. But that can be problematic when presented with a zero-day threat, or when analysis of weeks or months of data is needed to fully reveal the impact of a breach.

Historically, security practitioners have tried to use log aggregation tools for threat detection and response purposes, but with limited success. As the sheer volume of both threats and data multiplies, legacy SIEM solutions cannot keep up with the scale of data ingestion, analysis, retention and querying required for modern cloud-native environments. As a result, many security teams have resorted to trying to build their own tools for threat detection and response at scale, which brings about other challenges in terms of the resources required to build and maintain homegrown tools.

In recent years, new solutions like Panther have emerged that take a cloud-native approach to solving the challenges of threat detection and incident response at scale. By treating security as the big data problem that it is, solutions like Panther were built from the ground up to effortlessly ingest and transform terabytes of raw logs per day into a structured security data lake to power real-time detection, swift incident response, and thorough investigations.

Now that more solutions are available to address the need for high-scale TDIR, security teams can overcome many of the aforementioned challenges.

Acronym overload: TDIR, XDR, next-gen SIEM, etc.

As any security practitioner knows, there are numerous acronyms and labels to describe different types (and the same types) of security tools. SIEM, XDR, EDR, NDR, TDIR… and the list goes on. On top of that, there are descriptive terms like “security monitoring,” “security analytics,” “security intelligence,” “security operations,” and more.

At the end of the day, it’s more about the security outcomes you are looking to achieve and how a platform can help you get there than what the platform is called. Given that threat detection and incident response are the core responsibilities of any security operations team, the most important consideration when evaluating a solution is how well it can help your team, within your specific environment. Ultimately, you want the platform that achieves these outcomes with the most efficient use of time, money and effort.

So how to make sense of it all? First, we’ve covered the differences between XDR and SIEM here, which goes into more detail.

Here’s the TL;DR on TDIR: TDIR platforms represent the top level, while SIEM, SOAR, and XDR are functionalities within the TDIR umbrella.