Managed Detection & Response (MDR)

MDR lives on endpoint and extended detection data: process trees, command lines, network connections, script execution, identity events and cloud API calls. This is the layer where attacker behaviour shows up first. A ransomware operator has to run tools, move laterally and touch credentials before they encrypt anything, and every one of those steps leaves a trace on the endpoint if something is watching.

The difference between a noisy tool and managed detection and response is the analyst. When a detection fires, a person looks at it, pulls the surrounding events, decides whether it is a red team, a broken script or a real intruder, and then does something about it. You are buying judgement and speed, not another feed to ignore.

A managed SOC casts a wide net across your whole estate: firewalls, VPN, identity, cloud and endpoints, correlating many log sources to spot broad patterns, often co-managed with your own team. MDR is sharper and more endpoint-centric, built for speed of containment on the hosts where attacks actually execute. One is breadth of visibility; the other is depth and reaction time at the point of compromise.

If your main worry is ransomware, stolen laptops and endpoint compromise, and you want someone who will isolate a machine at 2am, MDR is the direct answer. If you need broad monitoring and log correlation across a large mixed estate for compliance and visibility, a SOC fits better. Plenty of our clients run both, with MDR as the fast-response layer inside a wider SOC. We will tell you honestly which you actually need.

Telemetry streams into our detection platform, where behavioural rules and threat intelligence surface candidates. Analysts triage every one that matters, discard the false positives, and enrich the rest with context so a decision can be made quickly and correctly.

Rules only catch what someone thought to write a rule for. Our senior analysts hunt through your telemetry for the quiet signs of an intruder living off the land: unusual parent-child process chains, credential access patterns, odd scheduled tasks, beaconing that hides in normal traffic. This is where dwell time gets cut from weeks to hours.

When we confirm a threat, we act within the authority you have granted: isolate the endpoint from the network, kill the malicious process, block the command-and-control domain, and disable the compromised account. Endpoint isolation stops lateral movement cold while keeping the machine online for forensics. Speed here is the whole point.

Full incident response when it is serious

If a detection turns into a genuine breach, our 24/7 incident response team steps in to help you contain, eradicate and recover, and to reconstruct how the attacker got in so it does not happen twice. MDR and IR are the same people, so there is no handoff to a stranger at the worst possible moment.

A phished document runs a script, a compromised credential logs in from a new country, a vulnerable service spawns a shell. These first moves are noisy on the endpoint if you are watching the process and identity telemetry, and catching them here is far cheaper than catching them later.

An intruder rarely lands where the valuable data is. They move: dumping credentials, using remote services, escalating to a domain admin. These techniques have distinctive signatures we hunt for specifically, because this is the window where a small incident becomes a company-wide one.

Before encryption, operators disable backups, turn off security tooling and exfiltrate data for double extortion. Each of those is a loud, catchable action. Catching one of them is often the difference between a contained incident and a ransom note, and it is the reason we hunt specifically for backup-tampering and security-tool tampering rather than waiting for the encryption itself to trip an alarm.

If you already run a capable EDR or XDR platform, we can operate on top of it so you are not paying twice for managed detection and response tools. If you do not, we deploy one as part of the service. Either way, the value we add is the analysts and the response, not a licence resold at a markup.

We agree in advance exactly what we can do without waking you: isolate a host, reset a credential, block a domain. Pre-authorising the fast actions is what makes a two-minute containment possible instead of a two-hour email thread.

The agent deploys through your existing management tooling and runs without slowing machines down, so users rarely notice it is there. We start in a learning mode to baseline normal behaviour on your fleet, then switch detections live once we can tell your routine admin activity from something worth waking a person for. Within the first weeks you get an initial hunt across the estate, which frequently surfaces old, dormant problems nobody knew were sitting there.

The service maps to ISO 27001 monitoring and incident-management controls, SOC 2 detection and response criteria, and the DORA requirement for financial entities to detect, respond to and recover from ICT incidents. Our reports are written to be handed straight to an assessor.

Fast, accurate detection is what makes the GDPR 72-hour breach-notification deadline realistic. Our incident write-ups give you the confirmed scope and timeline you need to notify correctly rather than guess.