What Is EDR?(Endpoint Detection and Response)
Stop adversaries faster with Trend Micro advanced detection and response.
EDR Meaning
Endpoint detection and response combines real-time, continuous monitoring , endpoint data collection, and advanced correlation to detect and respond to suspicious activities at host and endpoint connections. This approach enables security teams to rapidly identify and correlate activities to produce high-confidence detections with both manual and automated response options.
Endpoints are some of the most vulnerable points in your network. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, 68% of organizations have been affected by one or more endpoint attacks ending in compromised data or the entirety of an infrastructure. Further, the same report revealed that 68% of workers in IT found that said attacks had increased from the year before.
With ransomware and malware attacks becoming more frequent and aggressive, having an endpoint detection and response system in place to help pinpoint possible threats and investigate them is integral to organizations of every size.
Endpoint detection and response helps mitigate these threat campaigns by continuously scanning for suspicious behavior and alerting your security team to any possible threats that need to be neutralized. EDR allows you to monitor both endpoint, server, and host access points constantly, while perpetually searching for anything that could be a threat.
How Does EDR Work?
EDR solutions provide comprehensive endpoint protection by combining several essential capabilities that work together to detect, investigate, and respond to threats effectively.
Continuous Monitoring and Data Collection
EDR tools constantly observe endpoint behavior and gather extensive telemetry, including login activity, file access, process execution, and network communications. This continuous data collection creates a rich historical record that supports both real-time alerts and retrospective investigations.
Real-Time Analysis and Threat Detection
As data is collected, it’s analyzed in real time using a combination of threat intelligence, behavioral analytics, and machine learning. This allows the system to detect suspicious activities and identify threats that traditional antivirus tools may not catch, such as fileless malware or lateral movement attempts.
Automated Threat Response
When suspicious activities are detected, EDR platforms can perform automated measures to mitigate risk. This may involve isolating the endpoint from the network to terminate malicious processes or notifying the security team for a manual review. This approach guarantees a quicker and more uniform initial reaction to possible threats.
Investigation and Remediation
Security teams can leverage EDR to analyze alerts using tools that trace the complete lifecycle of an attack, from the point of entry to actions taken within the system. These findings enable responders to swiftly pinpoint root causes and implement corrective measures, such as patching vulnerabilities or recovering impacted systems.
Forensic Capabilities
EDR solutions preserve detailed records that enable forensic analysis long after an incident has occurred. Analysts can use this data to reconstruct attacker behavior, conduct threat hunting, and support compliance reporting, making it a critical part of post-incident reviews.
Key EDR Features
Your network’s security team has an important job to do. On top of ensuring the network is stable and secure, they must monitor any possible threats or issues that occur over time.
Provides real-time alerts
With endpoint detection and response, your security team receives real-time alerts about possible issues that may arise over time. This may include unexpected endpoint activity or potential attempts to infect your endpoints with malware or ransomware. Because cybersecurity threats continue to grow each year, it is prudent to provide your security team with the tools they need to keep a constant, watchful eye on everything happening within your network.
Some examples of useful information EDR can provide your security team:
- User accounts that have logged in, both directly or through remote access
- Any changes made to ASP keys, executables, and other usage of administrative tools
- A list of process executions
- Records of file creation, including .ZIP and .RAR files
- Usage of removable media, such as USB drives
- All local and external addresses that have connected to the host
Detect, investigate, and review
With EDR, your security technology can detect and track the movement of potential threats in the environment. Once detected, these issues can be delegated to your security team for further investigation. Because EDR security solutions can monitor endpoints, servers and workloads, the ability to investigate and respond to threats that are detected is key for providing a secure platform for your business.
Automatically uncovers stealthy attackers
EDR can uncover stealthy attackers thanks to its continuous and comprehensive visibility across all your endpoints. This means you’ll get a comprehensive view of activity happening on your endpoints, and can easily respond to any anomalies that arise.
EDR gives you complete oversight of your endpoint’s security-related processes. This expanded coverage allows your security team to focus on issues in real time and observe any commands or processes that may be in use on your endpoint.
Proactive defense
Endpoint detection and response enables more proactive defense for your network by allowing threat hunters to search for threats that may appear on your network and at various endpoints. These hunters can search for and investigate any threats the system detects and advise your security team of the issues and activities so that it can be taken care of quickly.
Why is EDR important?
Alert fatigue
Security alerts are a critical component of cyber threat management. While they offer up-to-the-minute visibility over what's occurring within your environment, they can also create alert fatigue, which can negatively affect key performance indicators like mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) and mean-time-to-detect (MTTD).
Alert fatigue can occur when a security team is regularly exposed to an excessive number of alerts. Over time, this can overwhelm analysts and impact response time.
On their own, alerts usually nothing to get too worried about. But when several alarms sound at regular intervals, analysts can spend most of their time investigating false positives, letting the potential costly or devastating security incidents fall by the wayside.
When it comes to day-to-day monitoring, analysts will ultimately be sifting through multiple alerts meant to help mitigate cyber risk. Over time, this can lead to burnout as security teams struggle to stay on top of what can often be an overwhelming number of alerts to respond to. EDR and a selection of optimized automated responses can help to reduce alert fatigue.
Leaving continuous monitoring and the collection of endpoint data, as well as customized automated responses to an EDR security solution can reduce stress on analysts and leave them to perform their job duties in a much less stressful manner.
Accelerated remediation
Endpoint detection and response uses the implementation of deep analysis and forensics. Because the EDR technology is handling the heavy lifting, your security team can focus on taking response actions against any issues that arise as quickly as possible. This leads to accelerated remediation, which means less time for potential risks to cause problems within your network. With EDR, your security team can identify and handle threats before they become a full-on breach.
Prevention can’t stop all threats
If you don’t have an EDR solution in your security stack , you may not be doing all you can to proactively monitor possible issues. If traditional point products and prevention systems fail, without EDR, bad actors can have access to your system for weeks, maybe even months, without your security team’s knowledge. EDR helps reduce this possibility by providing real-time monitoring to help weed out any issues that might slip through your preventive measures.
As noted, without technology in place to monitor your environment continuously, bad actors can gain access to your network and then return at will. This opens the door for malware and ransomware to collect data or for outsiders to access confidential data. With EDR, your system will always be under a watchful eye. That means any threats that make it through will be identified and can be handled before they grow larger in scope.
Data isn’t enough
Collecting data about threats on your endpoints isn’t always enough. Your security team should be outfitted with all the tools they need to handle any issues or threats that arise. Without actionable intelligence, the threats cannot be handled, which could leave bad actors with access to important data.
Further, EDR will allow your security team to take full advantage of a new set of tools that might not have been previously available to them. EDR can open the doors that your security team needs to be able to perform at their highest quality and speed. Acting on threats quickly is just as important as identifying the threats.
With EDR, your team can combine the real-time monitoring systems with the data they already have to help pinpoint where threats came from, how they gained access to the system, and even what kinds of systems might have been affected by the threat. This is key, especially as you fight back against the growing cybersecurity issues plaguing many companies today.
Additionally, EDR allows your security team to expedite the process. Remediation, when it takes too long, can prove to be quite costly. It can cost you data, and possibly even money if ransomware is involved in the attack. With EDR, your system will be constantly monitored so that your security team can focus its efforts on dealing with threats before they get access to sensitive data and cost you time and money.
Protection in the cloud
Most EDR systems are delivered through cloud-based solutions. This is an important element, as cloud-based solutions ensure there’s no impact on endpoints. If a threat is detected or if an endpoint is taken down, cloud-based EDR systems can operate as normal, as your security environment maintains the same level of complete monitoring and protection from potential risks.
Additionally, a cloud-based EDR system means that real-time monitoring and other important security aspects can never be bogged down by issues that arise across various endpoints.
Benefits of EDR
EDR offers a range of advantages that go beyond basic endpoint protection:
Improved Threat Visibility
EDR provides deep, continuous insight into all endpoint activity, helping to surface threats that would otherwise go unnoticed. This includes identifying lateral movement, abnormal behavior, and insider threats that traditional security tools may miss.
Faster Incident Response
Automated detection and response capabilities help reduce mean-time-to-respond (MTTR). By isolating affected endpoints and terminating malicious processes automatically, EDR enables your team to respond within minutes—not hours or days.
Reduced Dwell Time
Threat actors often remain undetected in networks for weeks or months. EDR significantly shortens this dwell time by flagging threats early in the attack chain, before they escalate into full-scale breaches.
Enhanced Threat Hunting
EDR gives security analysts powerful telemetry and behavioral data to proactively search for indicators of compromise (IOCs). This shifts security operations from reactive to proactive, strengthening long-term defenses.
Compliance Support
Cost Efficiency Through Early Detection
By identifying threats before they cause widespread damage, EDR helps reduce the financial impact of breaches. Fewer disruptions, lower recovery costs, and minimized data loss all contribute to better risk ROI.
EDR vs XDR vs MDR
As cybersecurity ecosystems grow more complex, many organizations evaluate how EDR compares to other detection and response models like XDR and MDR.
Trend Micro EDR Solution
Detect and respond faster with EDR and XDR
Stop adversaries with a broader perspective and better context to hunt, detect, investigate, and respond to threats with EDR.