Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) remains a foundational element of modern cybersecurity. It provides deep visibility into activity occurring on endpoints such as laptops, servers, and workstations, allowing security teams to detect suspicious behaviour, investigate incidents, and respond to threats more effectively than with traditional antivirus tools.
However, the rapid evolution of attacker techniques has exposed the limitations of relying solely on endpoint-focused security. Today’s cyber attacks rarely occur on a single device. Instead, they unfold across complex hybrid environments that include cloud services, remote users, SaaS platforms, operational technology, and unmanaged devices.
In this environment, attackers no longer need to break through a single perimeter. They simply need to gain access somewhere within the environment and begin moving across it.
This is why organisations increasingly recognise that EDR alone cannot provide the visibility required to stop modern cyber attacks. To detect and respond effectively, security teams must extend visibility across the network itself using Network Detection and Response (NDR).
There was a time when enterprise networks were relatively simple. Organisations operated from a handful of offices connected to a central data centre. Security strategies focused on defending a clearly defined perimeter.
That model has largely disappeared.
Today’s enterprise environments are distributed, hybrid, and constantly expanding. Data resides across cloud platforms and on-premise infrastructure. Employees work remotely using personal and corporate devices. SaaS applications are adopted rapidly across departments. Internet of Things devices, operational technology, and third-party integrations introduce additional complexity.
From a defender’s perspective, these environments may appear as separate domains such as endpoint, cloud, identity, and network. Attackers do not see them that way.
To an attacker, the entire environment represents a single connected attack surface.
Their objective is simple: gain a foothold somewhere in the network and begin expanding access.
EDR remains a powerful defensive capability, but threat actors increasingly design their techniques to avoid or disable endpoint controls.
Attackers have become highly effective at exploiting gaps in endpoint visibility. Many systems within modern environments cannot run EDR agents, including network infrastructure devices, legacy systems, IoT equipment, and operational technology platforms. These devices can provide ideal entry points into the network.
Even where EDR is deployed, attackers frequently rely on techniques designed to evade detection. “Living off the land” attacks use legitimate administrative tools already present on systems to carry out malicious activity. Because these tools are trusted by the operating system, they can be difficult for endpoint tools to classify as malicious.
In some cases, attackers disable security agents after gaining privileged access. In others, they operate entirely in memory, avoiding traditional malware files that EDR solutions are designed to detect.
Industry research highlights the scale of this challenge. Over 50% of major breaches involve attackers bypassing endpoint controls. Many modern attacks also span multiple domains, involving endpoint compromise, identity abuse, network movement, and cloud exploitation simultaneously.
Despite the complexity of modern attacks, the underlying strategy used by many threat actors is surprisingly simple.
Attackers typically rely on three basic approaches to evade detection:
With this approach, attackers can bypass prevention technologies, evade EDR detection, and operate quietly inside an organisation’s environment.
Speed further increases the challenge for defenders. Research from CrowdStrike indicates that attackers can move laterally across networks in as little as 48 minutes after initial compromise. Meanwhile, the average time for organisations to identify and contain breaches can stretch into months.
Without broader visibility across the environment, attackers may remain undetected long enough to escalate privileges, exfiltrate data, or deploy ransomware.
EDR provides detailed insight into activity on individual systems. However, it does not always capture the broader attack path as attackers move through the environment.
Modern cyber attacks typically involve lateral movement across internal systems, abuse of privileged credentials, and covert communication with external command infrastructure. These activities often generate signals within network traffic rather than on endpoints themselves.
For example, unusual authentication patterns, unexpected internal connections, and abnormal data transfers may all indicate attacker activity. Without network visibility, these signals may remain hidden.
This creates a dangerous blind spot. Security teams may be monitoring endpoints closely while attackers move quietly across the network.
Network Detection and Response addresses these visibility gaps by analysing network traffic across the entire environment. Rather than relying on endpoint agents, NDR observes communications between systems, allowing it to detect suspicious behaviour across both managed and unmanaged devices.
Because NDR focuses on network behaviour, it can identify attacker activity that would otherwise remain invisible to endpoint tools. This includes lateral movement between systems, suspicious authentication behaviour, covert command-and-control traffic, and attempts to exfiltrate sensitive data.
Advanced NDR platforms use behavioural analytics and machine learning to establish a baseline of normal network activity. When anomalies occur, such as unusual communication patterns or unexpected device interactions, security teams are alerted to investigate.
This allows defenders to identify attacks earlier in the kill chain and respond before significant damage occurs.
Another major challenge for security operations centres is alert overload. Modern security environments generate vast numbers of alerts from multiple tools across endpoint, cloud, identity, and network layers.
Each system may produce valuable signals, but when viewed in isolation these alerts often lack context. Analysts must spend significant time investigating false positives and correlating events across different tools.
By introducing NDR, organisations gain a broader view of activity across the environment. Network visibility provides context that helps analysts connect suspicious events, identify real attacks more quickly, and reduce time spent investigating benign activity.
This improves both the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations teams.
Security strategies have traditionally focused on preventing attackers from entering the environment. While prevention remains essential, modern security leaders increasingly recognise that detection and response capabilities are just as important.
EDR plays a critical role in preventing and investigating endpoint compromise. However, resilient security also requires the ability to detect attackers who have already gained access.
NDR provides that capability by identifying suspicious behaviour across the network and exposing attacker movement that might otherwise remain hidden.
Together, EDR and NDR provide complementary visibility across both endpoints and networks, significantly improving the ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats.
Cyber attacks are becoming faster, stealthier, and more complex. Attackers exploit identity systems, move laterally across networks, and leverage legitimate tools to avoid detection.
To defend against these threats, organisations must extend their visibility beyond individual devices and understand how activity unfolds across the entire environment.
EDR remains a vital component of modern cybersecurity. However, on its own it cannot provide the coverage required to detect modern attacks.
By combining endpoint visibility with network detection through NDR, organisations gain a far more complete picture of attacker behaviour and close critical gaps in their security posture.
In today’s borderless digital environments, effective cyber defence depends on seeing not just what happens on endpoints, but how threats move across the network itself.
Get in touch with the experts at Integrity360 for your EDR and NDR needs and how we can support your organisation when it comes to strengthening its cybersecurity.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a cybersecurity technology that monitors endpoint devices such as laptops, servers, and workstations to detect malicious activity. EDR tools analyse system behaviour, identify suspicious processes, and allow security teams to investigate and respond to threats on individual devices.
Network Detection and Response (NDR) is a security technology that analyses network traffic to identify suspicious activity across an organisation’s infrastructure. NDR detects threats such as lateral movement, command-and-control communications, credential abuse, and data exfiltration by monitoring communications between systems.
EDR focuses on detecting threats on individual endpoints, while NDR focuses on monitoring network traffic between systems. EDR provides deep visibility into host activity, while NDR reveals how attackers move across networks. Together they provide broader threat detection coverage.
EDR cannot be deployed on every device within an environment and may miss attacker activity occurring within network traffic. Attackers often bypass endpoint controls using techniques such as living-off-the-land attacks, credential abuse, or by targeting unmanaged devices.
Combining EDR and NDR provides visibility across both endpoints and network communications. This layered approach improves detection accuracy, reduces blind spots, and allows security teams to identify attacks earlier in the attack chain.
NDR can identify early indicators of ransomware activity such as lateral movement, suspicious internal connections, or abnormal data transfers. Detecting these behaviours early can help organisations stop ransomware attacks before encryption begins.
NDR provides additional context around suspicious activity, helping security operations centres correlate alerts across endpoints, networks, and identity systems. This reduces false positives and enables analysts to focus on genuine threats more efficiently.