Customize Your EDR To Adapt To Your Environment With SentinelOne Storyline Active Response (STAR)

Modern adversaries are continually automating their techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) to evade defenses. To keep up, it makes sense that enterprise security teams should also be able to automate their response to the latest threats and identify ongoing campaigns in their environment. Machine-learning and rules-based detections capture unusual behaviors and common threats. However, they often require new agent logic, and updating your entire fleet to the latest agent to stop a new threat may not always be possible. Similarly, with EDR data producing millions or even billions of events a day, security teams need a way to look for the interesting behavioral and static indicators of compromise (IOCs) that might indicate a zero-day attack. While robust EDR data helps investigations, it may prove too noisy for useful alerting or discovering unusual behaviors.

Singularity ActiveEDRR provides advanced detection capabilities, best in class visibility, and allows the end user to write custom detection rules that address new threats or targeted threats specific to their industry or organization with Storyline Active Response (STAR)TM.

STAR lets enterprises incorporate custom detection logic and immediately push it out to their entire fleet, or a subset, to either kill any matching process or alert on it for further investigation. STAR can alleviate SOC burden as it can be used as a powerful policy enforcement tool, automatically mitigating threats and quarantining endpoints.

STAR can also add a new layer between threats and EDR data that can alert on a subset of interesting events instead of the entire dataset. This data can be easily consumed into a SIEM, bringing down the cost of using EDR data in a SIEM while making sure that no interesting events slip by.

How STAR Works

ActiveEDR comes with a default set of behavioral detection rules created by high-level research teams and provides endpoint protection from day one. SentinelOne enables customers to leverage these insights with STAR. With STAR custom detection rules, SOC teams can turn queries from Deep Visibility, SentinelOne’s EDR data collection and querying mechanism, into automated hunting rules that trigger alerts and responses when rules detect matches. STAR also allows users an automated way to look at every endpoint event collected across their entire fleet and evaluate each of those events against a list of rules.

Create a STAR Rule In Four Steps

1. Write a query in Deep Visibility or create a new custom rule.
   
2. Add an event condition.
   
3. Designate response actions.
   
4. Save the Rule.
   

STAR evaluates every endpoint event collected against every STAR rule. For large enterprises, STAR evaluates each event, in a stream of a billion daily events, against up to 1,000 STAR rules. It does this by working with Deep Visibility, which collects billions of events a day, so many that it detected every step of the 176-step attack in the latest MITRE test. STAR leverages that industry-leading technology and query language to write criteria that determine, in near real-time, if a collected event is part of a threat or is suspicious.

What makes STAR invaluable is the set of response tools it puts in the users’ hands when an event matches its criteria. The engine not only integrates with Deep Visibility but also with the agent. By checking a box when creating a rule, the analyst can enable STAR to kill any process that matches a STAR rule. By checking a different box, the user can enable STAR to automatically quarantine any device that sees a matching event. Rules can also be written to detect suspicious events and alert on them, allowing the users to then consume those alerts in the UI or via Syslog for further analysis in a SIEM.

Key STAR Use Cases

STAR has two main functions within a SOC, and most customers find value in both.

1. Mitigate new and emerging zero-day threats
   No SOC Analyst wants to depend entirely on a vendor to protect from bleeding-edge attacks or novel threats emerging in niche locations or industries. As soon as they see a new threat emerge, analysts want the ability to write a rule that will detect and prevent that threat. Teams deeply value having the power to write their policy when they need to. STAR allows users to write rules that look for highly specific threats to their environment and automatically kill those threats.

   The screenshot below shows an example of a STAR rule to detect Hafnium Exchange zero-day threat.
   

2. Augment SIEM data with low volume, high-value telemetry
   STAR allows users to generate new data points, highlighting suspicious behavior in their environment for automated cross-correlation in a SIEM or manual investigation. Security teams also find data to be invaluable. SentinelOne has quickly become known for its industry-leading EDR visibility and longer default retention. STAR builds on that story with the ability to generate alerts on almost anything. Customers leverage that data via UI, API, and Syslog to stitch together complicated attacks and shut them down.

   The following screenshot shows an example of a STAR rule to find a compromised computer using FTP to exfiltrate data.
   

SentinelOne Storyline Active Response (STAR)

Customize EDR to adapt to your environment

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Conclusion

You can stay ahead of adversaries by customizing and automating detection rules that fit your business and environment with STAR.

With SentinelOne Storyline Active Response, you can proactively monitor and respond to incoming threat intelligence by turning queries into automated hunting rules. STAR is easy to use, powerful, and flexible thanks to Deep Visibility’s intuitive query language with regular expression support for complex queries.

We built STAR to enable your SOC team to react faster and more effectively. Whether you need to mitigate new and emerging zero-day threats with custom detection rules, augment SIEM and Data lake data with low volume, high-value telemetry, trigger automated workflows, or automate your threat hunting queries, SentinelOne Storyline Active Response has you covered.

If you would like to learn more about STAR and the SentinelOne XDR platform, contact us for more information or request a free demo.

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