Nation-state actors and well-funded criminal organizations employ advanced persistent threat (APT) methodologies designed specifically to evade traditional security measures. These attackers conduct extensive reconnaissance, move laterally with patience, and maintain persistent access over extended periods—often remaining undetected for months or years.
Sophisticated attackers routinely bypass traditional security controls through living-off-the-land techniques, fileless malware, and encrypted communications, among other techniques. While endpoint detection and response (EDR) has gotten pretty good at stopping threats that touch a managed endpoint, threats are evolving to avoid EDR or target devices that aren’t managed, which is the case with the recent Volt and Salt Typhoon attacks.
Elite defenders recognize that this complexity necessitates an expansion from traditional perimeter-focused security into other points of visibility with an emphasis on detection and response capabilities and continuous monitoring.
But, security professionals don’t have to be in a large organization or have a significant budget to be an elite defender if they know a few secrets.
1. Prioritize comprehensive network visibility
Elite defenders strive for complete visibility into all network traffic. They recognize that modern attackers rarely reach their final targets directly—instead, they move laterally, escalate privileges, and establish persistence across multiple systems.
This visibility powers the tools and processes to build an accurate picture of an organization’s network baseline, understanding normal communication patterns, protocols, and data flows. This baseline awareness enables them to quickly identify anomalous activity that may indicate compromise. They extend this visibility beyond traditional perimeters to include cloud environments, remote locations, and encrypted traffic channels that might otherwise become security blind spots.
By proactively auditing their monitoring coverage and closing visibility gaps before attackers can exploit them, top teams maintain awareness of all network activities regardless of where they occur in the modern distributed enterprise.
2. Collect rich, protocol-aware network data
The most effective defenders collect high-fidelity, protocol-aware network metadata that provides context far beyond basic NetFlow information, revealing not just that systems communicated, but the specifics of those communications.
This rich data includes insights into application-layer activities, capturing details about HTTP transactions, DNS queries, database commands, and other protocol-specific information. Such depth proves invaluable during investigations, allowing analysts to reconstruct attack sequences without pivoting between multiple data sources.
Elite teams also maintain sufficient historical data to conduct thorough investigations when threats are eventually discovered, recognizing that sophisticated attacks may go undetected for months before discovery. This requires that the data be compact enough to not generate significant storage costs while being rich enough to inform both proactive threat hunting and forensic investigations.
3. Deploy multi-layered detection capabilities
Top security teams implement multi-layered detection approaches rather than relying on a single methodology. This typically includes:
- Signature-based detection for identifying known threats and indicators of compromise
- Behavioral analytics for spotting suspicious patterns
- Machine learning models that recognize subtle deviations from normal behavior
- Protocol analysis that identifies standard violations or unusual protocol usage
This layered approach enables them to catch both known threats and novel attack techniques. The most effective teams continuously evaluate their detection methods, tuning and improving them to adapt to evolving threats and minimize false positives while maintaining high detection rates.
4. Implement continuous threat hunting and dwell time reduction
Elite defenders don’t just wait for alerts—they proactively hunt through network data to discover potential threats before automated systems detect them. These hunting exercises often focus on specific hypotheses about attacker behavior or emerging threats relevant to their industry.
These teams are accountable for metrics like mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), continuously working to minimize the window attackers have within their environment. They recognize that every hour an attacker remains undetected increases the potential breach impact.
Top defenders implement automated response workflows that can take immediate action when high-confidence detections occur, containing threats before manual investigation begins. They regularly conduct exercises to test and improve their capabilities, learning from their mistakes and creating detections for any tactics, techniques, or procedures (TTPs) missed during the exercise to minimize the time between initial compromise and complete remediation. The visibility and detections are also extremely important for validation of that complete remediation.
5. Leverage the broad security ecosystem
Rather than treating network detection as a standalone capability, elite defenders ensure their network detection and response (NDR) solutions integrate seamlessly with SIEM platforms, EDR tools, threat intelligence systems, and other security technologies. This creates a unified security posture where findings from one system enhance and inform others.
The best teams select NDR solutions built on open standards that facilitate integration and enable custom use cases rather than locking them into proprietary formats. This flexibility to integrate with a wide variety of data sources to enrich and draw on the power of other tools in the security community allows every organization to benefit from shared best practices, approaches, tools, and intelligence to accelerate response and limit potential damage.
Corelight provides elite defenders of all shapes and sizes with the tools and resources they need to ensure comprehensive network visibility and advanced NDR capabilities, based on the open-source Zeek network monitoring platform.
Visit corelight.com/elitedefense for more information.