Blackswan Cybersecurity CEO, Prof. Mike Saylor discusses Stellar Cyber Open XDR and why it was Blackswan’s preferred platform in 2023.
“An MSSP should be capable enough to focus on what the client’s true needs are both from a services and technology perspective, but also being as economical about it as you can. When we deploy Stellar, we are able to build deployment packages very quickly, whenever we need them.”
“The biggest benefit of working with Stellar is their people. The communication, the availability, the responsiveness, the innovation, the thought leadership. Those are all things that I look for in a partner. And those are all things that I’ve just been thoroughly and continually impressed with.”
Stellar Cyber Open XDR is a unified, AI-powered approach to detection and response that collects and correlates data from all existing security tools to protect the entire enterprise attack surface effectively and efficiently. Open XDR, unlike “closed” XDR, works with any underlying security control, including any EDR, eliminating the need for organizations to essentially hand over the control of their security stack to any single vendor.
Architecturally, Open XDR is about unifying and simplifying the entire security stack to improve detection and response radically. At any given organization, a security stack will consist of numerous capabilities like SIEM, EDR, NDR, SOAR, and more. These capabilities were never designed to work with each other, and teams spend too much time managing multiple tools, leading to today’s problems –
Too many tools, not enough people, and not the right data. That’s where Open XDR comes in to unify all capabilities, correlate alerts from individual tools into holistic incidents, and simplify by reducing administrative overhead. AI and automation come in as the only technically feasible way of protecting the entire attack surface effectively and efficiently, which is why it is a key architectural attribute of Open XDR.
The outcome of Open XDR is protecting your environments from threats from a single platform versus multiple tools with weak or non-existent connections band-aiding it all together. And the outcome of Open XDR is radically improved detection and response at a price anyone can afford.
Ingest and Normalize Data
Stellar Cyber ingests data from API based connectors (cloud or on prem), or from streaming log sources via protocols like Syslog. On prem data sources can be captured because of Stellar Cyber’s Sensors which can be deployed physically or virtually to hook into those environments. Data, regardless of its origin, gets normalized into a standard data model. Common fields like source IP, timestamp, or logon type are always standardized when possible to make workflows easy. Third party specific data is kept in a vendor data namespace. Data is also enriched with geolocation and asset context to increase the value of all telemetry.
Centralized Threat Detection — Stellar Cyber uses several methods to root out potential threats:
Easy-to-find sources of known bad are found through rules in Stellar Cyber, with new and updated rules being shipped continuously to all customers, sourced from our internal detection team and open communities like SigmaHQ.
Harder-to-find sources of known bad are identified using supervised machine learning detection. Stellar Cyber’s security research team develops models based on publicly available or internally generated datasets and continuously monitors model performance across the fleet.
Unknown and zero-day threats are uncovered using unsupervised machine learning techniques. These models look for anomalous behavior indicative of a threat. These models baseline over several weeks on a per-customer/per-tenant basis.
Sensor-Driven Threat Detection
Stellar Cyber’s sensors not only collect logs from cloud and on-prem sources, they also create visibility and deploy network based detections to the edge. Sensors package together Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and Malware Sandbox into a single configurable software package.
AI-Enabled Investigations
Correlation across detections and other data signals occurs through a Graph ML based AI that aids analysts by automatically assembling related data points. The AI determines connection strength between discrete events that can be sourced from any data source, based on property, temporal, and behavioral similarities. This AI is trained on real world data generated by Stellar Cyber and is continuously improved with its operational exposure.
Automated Response
Users have complete customizability over the context, conditions, and output of playbooks. Playbooks can be deployed globally or on a per tenant basis. Use any out-of-the box playbook for a standard response, or create a custom playbook for taking action back into an EDR, calling a web-hook, or simply sending an email.