Sophos Releases New EDR To Hunt-Down Evasive Threats

Sophos today unveiled an updated version of its Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), the first solution designed for both security analysts and IT administrators.

This significant advancement and new capabilities have made it faster and easier for security analysts to identify and neutralize evasive threats, and for IT administrators to proactively maintain secure IT operations to reduce risk.

“Security and IT teams of regional organizations often lack the visibility needed to detect threats, and breaches can take months to detect. Sophos Advanced EDR solves this problem by drastically reducing the time it takes to detect indicators of compromise”, said Sharon Ombongi, Country Manager Kenya, Sophos. “This new version of Sophos EDR will give Kenya’s organizations the threat intelligence and security expertise needed to quickly identify, prioritize, and respond to issues.”

According to Dan Schiappa, Chief Product Officer, Sophos, cybercriminals are raising the stakes, stopping at nothing to capitalize on expanded attack surfaces as organizations increasingly move to the cloud and enable remote workforces.

“Servers and other endpoints are all too insufficiently protected, creating vulnerable entry points that are ripe for attackers to exploit,” points out Schiappa. “Sophos EDR, therefore, helps identify these attacks, preventing breaches and shining a light on otherwise dark areas. Live querying capabilities only available with Sophos EDR in Intercept X enables organizations to search for past indicators of compromise and determine the current system state.”

This level of intelligence is critical in understanding changing attacker behaviors and reducing attacker dwell time.

Sophos also published new research, ‘An Insider View into the Increasingly Complex Kingminer Botnet,’ underscoring the use of servers in carrying out attacks and the importance of threat intelligence in detecting such activity.

The opportunistic Kingminer botnet attempts to gain server access by brute-forcing login credentials, and Sophos now finds that it’s using the infamous EternalBlue exploit in an attempt to spread malware among other attack mechanisms. The new version of Sophos EDR offers a custom-built query engine to detect indicators of compromise.

Kingminer shares many of the attributes that advanced ransomware attackers use to gain access, evidence of the need for EDR with the ability to hunt active attacks. According to Sophos’ recent State of Ransomware 2020 survey, only 24% of organizations breached in a ransomware incident were able to detect the intrusion and stop it before it was able to encrypt their files. Sophos’ new EDR capabilities help security and IT teams detect threats and breaches that could otherwise take months to uncover.

Sophos EDR now provides powerful visibility across an organisation’s entire estate, enabling security and IT practitioners to quickly answer critical threat hunting and IT security operations questions, and easily respond.

The new features include:

Live Discover: Pinpoint past and present activity with up to 90 days of data retention. Out-of-the-box ready SQL queries allow administrators to answer threat hunting and IT questions and can be selected from a library of pre-written options and fully customized by users. This flexible query engine provides access to some of the most granular and detailed endpoint activity recordings that are further enhanced with Sophos’ deep learning technology.
Live Response: Remotely respond and access endpoints and servers using a command-line interface to perform further investigation and remediate issues; easily reboot devices, install and uninstall software, terminate active processes, run scripts, edit configuration files, run forensic tools, isolate machines, and more.

Sophos EDR is powered by Sophos’ deep learning neural network, which is trained on hundreds of millions of samples to look for threat indicators. Security analysts and IT administrators also gain on-demand access to curated threat intelligence from SophosLabs, which tracks, deconstructs, and analyses more than 400,000 malware samples every day. Available now in Sophos Intercept X Advanced with EDR and Intercept X Advanced for Server with EDR at no added cost, Sophos EDR will support Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Its new Live Discover and Live Response features are easily managed in the threat analysis center on the cloud-based Sophos Central platform for real-time information sharing with

Sophos’ entire portfolio of next-generation cybersecurity solutions via its unique Synchronized Security approach. Combined with Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR), a fully-managed threat hunting, detection, and response service, organizations can boost capabilities with human analysis for a further evolved approach to proactive security protection.