Network Detection and Response (NDR) software is a type of security solution designed to monitor, detect, and respond to threats on a network. NDR tools analyze network traffic to identify suspicious activity, such as unusual data transfers, unauthorized access attempts, or malware communications.
They use a variety of techniques, including signature-based detection, behavioral analysis, and machine learning, to identify potential threats.
NDR software is important because it helps organizations detect and respond to cyber threats quickly, reducing the risk of data breaches and other security incidents. By providing real-time visibility into network traffic and identifying potential threats, NDR tools enable security teams to take proactive measures to protect their networks and data.
NDR software helps network security and cybersecurity professionals by providing them with the tools they need to monitor and secure their networks effectively. These tools can help them identify and respond to threats quickly, reducing the impact of cyber attacks and protecting their organization’s data and infrastructure.
Network Detection and Response (NDR) software has evolved significantly over the past decade to keep pace with the changing threat landscape and the increasing complexity of networks. In the past, NDR tools primarily focused on signature-based detection, which involved matching known patterns of malicious activity. However, as cyber threats became more sophisticated and diverse, NDR software began to incorporate more advanced techniques, such as behavioral analysis and machine learning, to detect unknown and zero-day threats.
Present-day NDR software offers a comprehensive approach to network security, combining multiple detection methods to provide better coverage and accuracy. These tools can analyze network traffic in real time, detect anomalies and suspicious activity, and provide actionable insights to security teams. They also offer integration with other security solutions, such as SIEMs and endpoint protection platforms, to provide a more holistic view of the organization’s security posture.
Overall, the evolution of NDR software has been driven by the need to detect and respond to threats quickly and effectively in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment. As cyber threats continue to evolve, NDR software will likely continue to adapt and innovate to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s security landscape.
Best Network Detection and Response (NDR) Software: What To Look For
When choosing the best Network Detection and Response (NDR) software for an organization, several factors, features, and capabilities should be considered:
- Detection Techniques: Look for NDR software that uses a variety of detection techniques, such as signature-based detection, behavioral analysis, and machine learning. This ensures that the software can detect both known and unknown threats.
- Real-Time Monitoring: The software should provide real-time monitoring of network traffic to detect and respond to threats as they occur.
- Scalability: Ensure that the NDR software can scale to meet the needs of your organization, whether you have a small network or a large, complex network infrastructure.
- Integration: Look for NDR software that integrates with other security solutions, such as SIEMs and endpoint protection platforms, to provide a more comprehensive view of your organization’s security posture.
- Alerting and Reporting: The software should provide alerts for suspicious activity and generate detailed reports that can help you analyze and respond to security incidents.
- Ease of Use: Choose NDR software that is easy to deploy, configure, and use, to minimize the impact on your IT team.
- Compliance: Ensure that the software complies with relevant regulations and standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, to help you meet your compliance requirements.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the NDR software, including licensing fees, deployment costs, and ongoing maintenance costs, to ensure that it fits within your budget.
- Vendor Reputation: Choose a reputable vendor with a track record of delivering high-quality security solutions and excellent customer support.
By considering these factors, features, and capabilities, organizations can choose the best NDR software to help protect their networks from cyber threats.
Best Network Detection and Response (NDR) Software Used By Security Professionals
1. Corelight
Disrupt attacks with Corelight’s Open Network Detection & Response (NDR) Platform. Improve detection coverage, accelerate incident response, increase SOC efficiency, and gain complete visibility over your network.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Streamline operations with a fully integrated solution: Open NDR combines dynamic network detections, AI, intrusion detection (IDS), network security monitoring (NSM), and packet capture (PCAP) in a single security tool that’s powered by proprietary and open-source technologies Zeek and Suricata.
- Correlate alerts & packets into evidence: Corelight’s platform fuses alerts and packets with rich, interconnected context to create a single source of truth that attackers cannot alter.
- Apply the right detection approach per threat: Leverage our machine learning, behavioral analytics, and other signatures to lower false positives and accelerate detection engineering response time.
- Automate core SOC capabilities: Our open core approach and broad integration strategy allows you to easily integrate Corelight data into existing SIEM, XDR, and SOAR solutions.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Corelight
2. Cortex XDR
Cortex XDR detection and response allows you to stop sophisticated attacks and adapt defenses to prevent future threats. Cortex XDR uses machine learning while analyzing network, endpoint and cloud data to accurately detect attacks, and it automatically reveals the root cause of alerts to speed up investigations.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Complete endpoint security: Safeguard your endpoints with NGAV, host firewall, disk encryption and USB device control.
- ML-driven threat detection: Find hidden threats like insider abuse, credential attacks, malware and exfiltration using behavioral analytics.
- Incident management: Cut investigation time with intelligent alert grouping. Incident scoring lets you focus on the threats that matter.
- Automated root cause analysis: Swiftly verify threats by reviewing the root cause, sequence of events, intelligence and investigative details all in one place.
- Deep forensics: Conduct deep internal and regulatory investigations, even if endpoints are not connected to the network.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Cortex XDR
3. ExtraHop
Get the instant visibility you need to identify risk faster, investigate smarter, and respond to threats with confidence.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Investigate smarter: Accelerate mean time to investigate threats with cloud-scale machine learning and robust retrospective forensics to produce high-fidelity detections. Quickly expose risk from core to edge to cloud with streamlined investigation workflows.
- Stops threats faster: Get visibility into encrypted network traffic and devices and workloads without endpoint agents. Identify living off the land and other signs of early stage attacks with full packet capture and line-rate decryption.
- Move at the speed of risk: Reveal hidden risk and implement compensating controls with real-time insight into vulnerabilities and security hygiene across your organization’s attack surface to improve decision making, regulatory reporting, and compliance.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: ExtraHop
4. Tenable OT Security
Tenable OT Security is an industrial security solution for your modern industrial enterprise. It can help you identify assets in your OT environment, communicate risk, prioritize action and enable your IT and OT security teams to work better together.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- In-depth asset visibility: Immediately discover all devices on your network whether they are active or dormant and get visibility into make, model and firmware version.
- Exposure management: Track risk scores and identify vulnerable assets giving you a simple method to mitigate threats and make the best use of your security team’s time.
- Streamlined audits: Validate configuration, change logs and access controls to ensure systems are compliant against corporate policies.
IDEAL FOR:
- Industrial organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Tenable OT Security
5. B1 Platform by CloudCover
CloudCover defends against “never-before-seen” zero-day events automatically with near perfect zero-false positive results operating at millisecond speed. Thus, the fastest most precise automated managed threat prevention solution in the world.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Gen-AI XDR/SASE NaaS: CloudCover is unique AI/ML network-centric security functioning as a secure access service edge “firewall everywhere” within a corporate network. It protects all egress-ingress data in-transit between any device on network by stopping “never-before-seen” zero-day malware with zero false-positive accuracy.
- Real-time active risk score: The CCIRUS™ active risk aware/control score is embedded into our CC/B1 (dashboard) which produces the corporate network infrastructure’s cyber security risk metric for real time network risk understanding and assists underwriting cybersecurity insurance in real time.
- AI/ML threat prevention: CloudCover extends AI/ML network detection of all ingress-egress traffic that can compromise the network. CC/B1 ‘shallow’ packet inspects and mitigates all network traffic both north-south as well as lateral east-west with unmatched precision and speed.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: B1 Platform by CloudCover
6. Vectra AI Platform
Move at the speed of hybrid and multi-cloud attackers with the integrated signal that powers your XDR.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Prioritization: Automatically correlates, scores and ranks incidents by urgency across all network, identity, cloud and SaaS environments.
- Detection: Automatically analyzes attacker behaviors post-compromise and in real time, covering >90% of MITRE ATT&CK techniques.
- Managed: Collaborate and communicate in real-time with Vectra MDR analysts to investigate and hunt attackers across your environment.
- Proactive: With a complete picture of attack progression and lateral movement post compromise, you can take proactive action early in the cyber killchain.
- Orchestrated: Seamlessly integrate with a wide range of EDR, SIEM, SOAR and ITSM providers to orchestrate and automate your playbooks.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Vectra AI Platform
7. LMNTRIX
LMNTRX shines a light on the deep and dark web by using our intelligence, knowledge and proprietary techniques to your advantage.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- The LMNTRIX Active Defense is a validated and integrated threat detection and response architecture that hunts down and eliminates the advanced and unknown threats that routinely bypass perimeter controls.
- Uses a combination of advanced network and endpoint threat detection, deceptions everywhere, analytics and global threat intelligence technology complemented with continuous monitoring and both internal and external threat hunting.
- This “no stone left unturned” approach means our clients gain a fully-managed, security analyst-delivered service that defends against zero-day attacks and advanced persistent threats 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Enterprises
PRODUCT WEBSITE: LMNTRIX
8. LogRhythm NetworkXDR
LogRhythm NDR enables overwhelmed security teams to detect network cyberattacks efficiently and effectively with advanced analytics. NDR collects user, host, and network data and utilizes both machine learning and deterministic detection techniques to gain seamless visibility, reducing the dwell time of threats that live outside the perimeter.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Eliminate Gaps in Visibility: Not every device can have an agent installed, and not every device can send a log. LogRhythm NDR provides a comprehensive view into all enterprise devices, entities, and network traffic while analyzing traffic flows across the environment, including activity that moves laterally.
- Detect the Undetectable: It’s the invisible threat that can harm your business. LogRhythm NDR identifies traffic anomalies that signal malicious activity such as command and control, lateral movement, data exfiltration, and malware activities. LogRhythm NDR can detect sophisticated evasion methods or “known unknown” cyber threats and brand new zero-day threats or “unknown unknowns.”
- Reduce Dwell Time: Reduce the pool of threats that need investigation. Our advanced analytics provides higher-fidelity alarms across the entire network to surface the most pertinent threats and reduce attacker dwell time by exposing their activity without them knowing.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: LogRhythm NetworkXDR
9. Cisco Adaptive Wireless IPS Software
Cisco Adaptive Wireless Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) offers advanced network security for dedicated monitoring and detection of wireless network anomalies, unauthorized access, and RF attacks. Fully integrated with the Cisco Unified Wireless Network, this solution delivers integrated visibility and control across the network, without the need for an overlay solution.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Event forensics with the ability to trace, locate, and capture RF events for analysis and reporting
- Alarm aggregation and correlation, plus historic reporting of alarms
- An extensive threat encyclopedia and dedicated research team to provide comprehensive, evolving threat protection
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Enterprises
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Cisco Adaptive Wireless IPS Software
10. Flowmon Platform
Flowmon allows you to pinpoint the root cause of network problems, gives you a complete network visibility and spots security threats with ease thanks to its AI-engine and unmatched flexibility.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Full network visibility: For NPMD, troubleshooting and capacity planning with full analytics drilldown.
- Dashboards and visualization: Customizable interface for the noise-free visualization of traffic structure or performance metrics.
- Stop threats: Ransomware, malware, insider & unknown threats, SUNBURST Trojan Attack, etc.
- No security gaps: Between perimeter and endpoint protection. Leverage AI/ML to detect threats others miss.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Enterprises
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Flowmon Platform
11. Darktrace Detect
Instant visibility. Every attack, including never-before-seen emerging threats.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- A bespoke, continuously evolving understanding of your business: Darktrace Self-Learning AI understands what makes you unique – every user, cloud account, desktop, laptop and server. Understanding your organization’s version of normal is the key to detecting everything that’s not.
- Always on, always evolving: Darktrace DETECT analyzes thousands of metrics to reveal subtle deviations that may signal an evolving threat – even unknown techniques and novel malware. It distinguishes between malicious and benign behavior, identifying attacks that typically go unnoticed.
- Simple implementation that learns the uniqueness of your business: Installs quickly, whether deployed in specific coverage areas like email or across the entire enterprise. Darktrace Self-Learning AI understands your organization’s normal patterns of life and continues to dynamically learn over time.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Enterprises
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Darktrace Detect
12. Blumira Automated Detection & Response
Automated threat detection and response. Detect threats 5X faster with Blumira’s advanced threat detection and response.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Automated host isolation: To stop the spread of ransomware or prevent attacker lateral movement, Blumira Agent’s automated host isolation allows you to remotely cut off an endpoint’s access to your network when an associated P1-P3 threat is detected in your environment. That way, you can have the peace of mind that any critical threat is contained immediately, giving you time to investigate safely.
- Automatically block malicious traffic: No need for manual intervention when malicious connections are detected – you can automatically block malicious source IPs or domains with Blumira’s Automated Blocking (for Dynamic Blocklists). Blumira’s platform easily integrates with all major firewall providers to provide this feature, such as Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, Sophos, F5 and more.
- Built-in security playbooks: The faster you can respond, the less impact a security incident has on your organization. With Blumira’s automated security platform, now you can – without being a security expert, or staffing a full security team.
- All-in-One XDR Platform: Typical SIEMs require a lot of complexity to set up, tune, analyze, investigate and respond to security events. Blumira’s platform gives your lean IT team the tools to quickly identify and respond to threats, without requiring a SOC (security operations center) to manage it.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Blumira Automated Detection & Response
13. InsightIDR
Next-gen SIEM for the cloud-first era. Scale and speed for hybrid environments. Embrace digital transformation, SaaS adoption, and agile development with elastic, cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM). Pinpoint critical, actionable insights. Command your attack surface with AI-driven behavioral detections, expertly vetted threat content, and advanced analytics.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Remove complexity from cloud threat response: Modern threat response requires a modern approach. Confidently triage cloud alerts with a purpose-built alert framework that surfaces critical alert summaries, impacted resources, and recommended response to prioritize and act on threats across cloud workloads and your evolving environment.
- InsightIDR delivers: an always-up-to-date library of ATT&CK-mapped detections that span AI-driven alerts, attacker analytics, and IOCs to provide complete and emergent threat coverage. Vetted in the field by our MDR experts, you get high fidelity coverage to keep your organization safe, anywhere.
- Consolidate with confidence: It’s a new take on SIEM: cloud-ready scale and extensibility, expert-vetted detections, and DFIR built for hybrid environments. Drive your security program forward with a SIEM that’s ready for the rest of your business.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprises
PRODUCT WEBSITE: InsightIDR
14. Arista NDR
Arista NDR analyzes billions of network communications to autonomously discover, profile and classify every device, user, and application across the new network—perimeter, core, IoT, and cloud networks. Based on this deep understanding of the attack surface, the platform then detects threats to and from these entities, while providing the context necessary to respond rapidly.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Faster detection and response: Arista NDR customers have seen up to an 88% reduction in the time to detect and time to respond to attacks, and a 3x average improvement in situational awareness of the environment.
- Lower false alerts: Independent comparative testing by the Tolly Group1 showed that Arista NDR had the lowest false negative rate, ensuring critical threats do not go unnoticed. This contributed to a signal-to-noise ratio of 95%–almost fifteen times better than the competition. Arista NDR thus dramatically lowers day-to-day operational costs compared to competitive solutions that generate high numbers of false alerts and therefore add to analyst workloads.
- Rapid investigations: The Tolly testing also showed that the NDR platform is best-in-class for threat validation by supporting investigative workflows with the context and information necessary for rapid remediation.
- Analyze encrypted traffic: Arista NDR parses data deeper than any other solution on the market, looking at the full network packet and drawing inferences based on data science even if the traffic is encrypted.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Arista NDR | Datasheet
15. NetWitness Platform
The key to network threat detection and fast threat response is comprehensive, real-time visibility into your entire IT infrastructure. NetWitness Network delivers this with full-packet capture, metadata and netflow—on premises, in the cloud and across virtual infrastructures. Detect and monitor emerging, targeted and unknown threats as they traverse the network. Plus, reconstruct entire network sessions for forensic investigations.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Alleviates analysts’ alert fatigue: NetWitness Network enriches log data with threat intelligence and contextual information to identify high-priority threats and reduce false positives.
- Eases management of network data: With pervasive visibility, NetWitness Network facilitates administration and analysis of data across your entire IT environment.
- Speeds network threat detection and response: NetWitness Network provides the immediate, deep network visibility required to accelerate network threat detection, investigation and forensics.
- Simplifies threat detection and investigation: NetWitness Network offers intuitive data visualizations and nodal diagrams, plus comprehensive automated detection, investigation and forensics tools.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: NetWitness Platform
16. ThreatWarrior NDR
Traditional defense-in-depth approaches and a wish for more human capital will not stem the tide. Organizations must leverage advanced AI. ThreatWarrior’s unsupervised neural networks, continuous deep packet inspection, and Contextual Insights hold the keys. Learn how ThreatWarrior helps security teams move from ‘puzzle solvers’ to ThreatWarriors. Our AI-advanced threat detection and response platform can serve as an NDR or XDR solution. The difference lies only in the data sources you choose. Prefer to run purely on network data sources like netflow and/or firewall logs? Go with our NDR solution.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- We scour the right data for you: On-premises, cloud, hybrid, network, endpoint, identity — everything. All collected, normalized, and ready for analysis.
- We analyze the data for you: Everything is correlated, contextualized, prioritized, and visualized — performed by unsupervised neural networks and deep learning.
- We translate all analyses for you: Natural Language Processing creates a simple narrative that makes it fast and easy to move to response and remediation action.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: ThreatWarrior NDR
17. Secureworks Taegis XDR
Extended detection and response. Secureworks Taegis XDR offers superior detection, unmatched response and an open platform built from the ground up to integrate market-leading technologies and deliver the highest ROI.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Unmatched prevention, detection and response: Industry-leading speed and quality of response, with the fastest time to detect, label, notify and investigate among XDR vendors.
- Built for collaboration and automation: Detect advanced threats with AI-powered analytics and comprehensive threat intelligence from the Secureworks Counter Threat Unit.
- Open platform designed to optimize and unify: Ingest and correlate data from across sources — endpoint, network, cloud, identity, email — and amplify your current tools.
IDEAL FOR:
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Secureworks Taegis XDR
In Conclusion…
Choosing the best Network Detection and Response (NDR) software for your organization involves careful consideration of various factors, features, and capabilities. It is essential to select NDR software that employs a variety of detection techniques, offers real-time monitoring, and can scale to meet the needs of your network.
Integration with other security solutions, ease of use, and compliance with regulations are also crucial factors to consider. Additionally, the cost-effectiveness of the software and the reputation of the vendor should not be overlooked. By taking these factors into account, organizations can select the NDR software that best fits their security needs and helps protect their networks from evolving cyber threats.