Mandiant Stories

FireEye Recognized as a Leader in U.S. Managed Detection and Response Services

Marshall Heilman
Aug 23, 2021
4 min read
|   Last updated: Oct 03, 2021

Every couple of years the security threat landscape is transformed. Companies must transform to protect themselves against the current threats and the emerging threats of tomorrow. 2021 has already featured several very public zero-day vulnerabilities, ransomware, extortion, and supply chain attacks plaguing companies of all industries. Security continues to be a prominent topic in the boardroom. All of this demonstrates how seriously companies must take their security posture to protect their brands, products, and customers. Many companies realize that augmenting their existing security functions with a managed detection and response (MDR) service makes financial sense and provides a level of protection they often cannot build or maintain. An effective MDR service must leverage up-to-the-minute front-line intelligence to augment alert prioritization and disposition, direct comprehensive threat hunting, and accelerate detection and response. FireEye's managed detection and response service, Mandiant Managed Defense, offers this level of visibility and expertise into immediate and emerging threats.

Today, IDC named FireEye a Leader in the 2021 IDC MarketScape: U.S. Managed Detection and Response Services Market 2021 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US48129921, August 2021).

The IDC MarketScape cited key market differences with our offering:

  • Detection capabilities fueled by Mandiant Threat Intelligence that are accelerated by machine learning and Integrated Reasoning provided by Mandiant Automated Defense.
  • Ability to monitor telemetry from Operational Technology (OT) partners and provide detection, tailored threat intelligence, threat hunting and response for OT customers.
  • Transparency afforded to customers including access to up-to-the-minute attacker tactics through the multi-application Mandiant Advantage platform.
  • Positive customer feedback on the overall service from detection capabilities integrated with threat intelligence, ease of implementation, threat hunting, and support from dedicated consultants. 

Managed Defense has always been at a unique cross-section of Mandiant as both a contributor and consumer of threat intelligence, a partner to Mandiant Consulting and now integrated with Mandiant Automated Defense for automation and acceleration of alert triage. This evolution has enabled Managed Defense to expand the service from only supporting the FireEye technology suite to now include a growing list of third-party technologies such as Microsoft Defender. 

As part of our dedication to continuous improvement, we significantly upgraded our proactive threat hunting program earlier this year. We designed the program in concert with our customers to meet their needs, as well as with our threat researchers and incident responders, to ensure the highest-fidelity results. Managed Defense threat hunting consists of hunts powered by up-to-the-minute threat intelligence from our trusted incident response (IR) practice and threat research across our vast telemetry. Customers have transparency into what we’re hunting and why, with results mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework. Through the Mandiant Advantage portal, customers can read about the attacker groups and/or techniques currently being hunted by Mandiant.

We welcome this recognition as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for U.S. MDR Services. This is a testament to the strength of our existing service and our commitment to continuous improvement that has accelerated our service and provided us greater visibility into threats affecting customers everywhere.

Protecting our customers before events hit the headlines is routine for Managed Defense. In the past year alone, we protected customers from significant events (both in and out of the headlines) such as SolarWindsSonicWallPulse Secure, and Microsoft Exchange. Most recently, we protected over 50 customers from a ransomware campaign targeting Kaseya’s VSA software, including a multi-brand restaurant company where the CISO was alerted to the software’s presence in their environment by Managed Defense experts.

This company, and many others, were kept safe thanks to the steadfast monitoring and quick actions of our Mandiant team. We work tirelessly with our customers to proactively protect them by identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities we see attackers exploiting in the wild. Managed Defense has not only found significant threats that would otherwise go undetected, but quickly responded at scale, deploying cutting-edge threat hunting campaigns and detections throughout our customers' environments.

We thank the IDC MarketScape for recognizing Managed Defense as a Leader in the U.S. Managed Detection and Response Services Market. Mandiant Managed Defense is unmatched at both the speed and scale with which we integrate attacker research into detection and response, and our experience combatting attackers every day. We will continue to rapidly innovate the service to stay ahead of tomorrow’s threats to be worthy of our leader status.