Announcing Our New Unit 42 MDR Service for Cortex XDR

Many organizations, from the smallest to the largest, are working with managed detection and response (MDR) providers to up-level their cybersecurity. Demand for MDR is increasing as attack surfaces grow, cloud usage surges and the cybersecurity skills gap widens.

Gartner predicts that “By 2025, 50% of organizations will be using MDR services for threat monitoring, detection and response functions that offer threat containment capabilities.” Organizations use MDR to reduce risk and enable them to sleep easy at night knowing they have continuous 24/7 coverage from a team of experts. Until recently, MDR services focused primarily on endpoint detection and response, but with the growing popularity of XDR, MDR services are now also available to cover the entire extended enterprise.

Enterprises spend a median of 37 days and a mean of $2.4 million to find and recover from a breach, according to Forrester. Detecting and responding to threats consistently, quickly and effectively helps contain them before damage and business disruption can be done. The right MDR provider brings expertise, focused telemetry and processes that deliver context, insights and visibility so your team can make accurate, fast decisions to contain and mitigate threats.

Today we launched our Unit 42 MDR service, a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Service for Cortex XDR, delivered by the Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 team.

This service is designed to deliver continuous 24/7 threat detection, investigation and response/remediation to customers of all sizes globally. This allows your team to scale fast and focus on what matters most to you. With the Unit 42 MDR service, Unit 42 experts will work for you to protect against cyber attacks 24/7.

This Unit 42 MDR Service uniquely leverages technology, data, processes and expertise.

• Built on industry-leading Cortex XDR technology, proven to offer best in class prevention and detection in recent “real world” MITRE and AV Comparatives evaluations.
• Managed by Unit 42 security experts, seasoned analysts who are world-leading experts in threat research, incident response and Cortex XDR. They have worked to advise CISO globally on advanced threats, including ransomware, state-sponsored attackers, cybercriminals, malicious insiders and malware.
• Enriched with world-class threat intelligence. Unit 42 analysts take advantage of extensive telemetry and threat intel from over 10 years of malware analysis experience. More than 30 million new samples and 500 billion events are received every day, giving unmatched breadth and depth of data to work with on your behalf.

Why We Launched an MDR Service

There is growing customer demand for MDR globally. The reality is that companies are looking for help to manage the complexity of the current threat landscape and growing attack surface. Many customers have turned to us as their trusted security provider of choice. Launching an MDR service built on our product, Cortex XDR is the logical next step for us in extending our services with a complete end-to-end managed security service.

The Unit 42 MDR service is based on Cortex XDR, so our Unit 42 analysts have unmatched visibility into all data sources (endpoint, network, cloud and identity) to quickly identify and stop malicious activity most likely to impact your organization. Because this MDR service is built on Cortex XDR, it is optimized to not just prioritize alerts, but to massively reduce the number of alerts received, so our analysts can focus on response and remediation.

How Is the Unit 42 MDR Service Unique?

• This end-to-end Palo Alto Networks Service offers you a full solution of both product and service from one vendor. Our deep knowledge of Cortex XDR and direct connection to the Cortex R&D team means we have early access to emerging Cortex XDR research and ensures you have the latest product capabilities and best practices.
• This service is modeled after the Palo Alto Networks SOC; it uses the technology and proprietary processes that are used by our SOC to protect one of the largest security companies in the world.
• Threat intelligence from a world-renowned threat research team that has deep expertise in advanced adversary tools, processes and tactics. Unit 42 threat intelligence brings critical context and alert enrichment to help you understand adversary intent and attribution, helping drive your decisions and priorities.

Unit 42 MDR provides multiple ways to transform your security operations:

• Improve threat detections, mitigation and containment with accelerated detection of intrusion and response.
• Stop breaches with access to seasoned Unit 42 analysts and threat hunting experts who can help you act fast to contain threats, eject adversaries and recover.
• Ensure 24/7 continuous security operations with a team of experts continuously monitoring your environment and using automations for faster remediation (not just prioritizing alerts).
• Harden your environment with experts providing periodic health checks of your security posture and detailed recommendations on policy changes and tuning.
• Focus on what matters to you, such as strategic initiatives rather than reactive tasks, non-stop alert noise and blinking lights.

This MDR service will give you added layers of expertise and protection. Attackers are humans and continually adapt to defeat countermeasures. Adding human expertise and proactive threat hunting, in addition to a leading EDR/XDR technology, will allow you to detect more suspicious activity than you would otherwise. And, it brings added protection, experience and context, so you can make more accurate decisions.

We understand that customers have a wide variety of needs and we are continuing to grow our large ecosystem of XMDR partners empowered with the most comprehensive XDR – Cortex XDR. Our certified XMDR partners are located globally and offer a broad range of managed services built on Cortex XDR, including local language capabilities. Customers now have an even broader choice of MDR offerings built on the best-in-class protection of Cortex XDR to help combat cyber attacks.

Join our webinar "Forward Together: Cortex XDR and Unit 42 MDR" to learn how Cortex XDR and Unit 42 MDR can help secure your organization.