Pass XDR-Analyst Exam Guide

The “Respond to Malicious Causality Chains” feature in a Cortex XDR Windows Malware profile allows the agent to take automatic actions against network connections and processes that are involved in malicious activity on the endpoint. The feature has two modes: Block IP Address and Kill Process1.

The two purposes of “Respond to Malicious Causality Chains” in a Cortex XDR Windows Malware profile are:

Automatically kill the processes involved in malicious activity. This can help to stop the malware from spreading or doing any further damage.

Automatically block the IP addresses involved in malicious traffic. This can help to prevent the malware from communicating with its command and control server or other malicious hosts.

The other two options, automatically close the connections involved in malicious traffic and automatically terminate the threads involved in malicious activity, are not specific to “Respond to Malicious Causality Chains”. They are general security measures that the agent can perform regardless of the feature.

 You can star security events in Cortex XDR in two ways: manually star an alert or an incident, or create an alert-starring or incident-starring configuration. Starring security events helps you prioritize and track the events that are most important to you. You can also filter and sort the events by their star status in the Cortex XDR console.

To manually star an alert or an incident, you can use the star icon in the Alerts table or the Incidents table. You can also star an alert from the Causality View or the Query Center Results table. You can star an incident from the Incident View or the Query Center Results table. You can also unstar an event by clicking the star icon again.

To create an alert-starring or incident-starring configuration, you can use the Alert Starring Configuration or the Incident Starring Configuration pages in the Cortex XDR console. You can define the criteria for starring alerts or incidents based on their severity, category, source, or other attributes. You can also enable or disable the configurations as needed.

When deploying Cortex XDR agent on Kubernetes clusters as a DaemonSet, the license required is Cortex XDR Cloud per Host. This license allows you to protect and monitor your cloud workloads, such as Kubernetes clusters, containers, and serverless functions, using Cortex XDR. With Cortex XDR Cloud per Host license, you can deploy Cortex XDR agents as DaemonSets on your Kubernetes clusters, which ensures that every node in the cluster runs a copy of the agent. The Cortex XDR agent collects and sends data from the Kubernetes cluster, such as pod events, container logs, and network traffic, to the Cortex Data Lake for analysis and correlation. Cortex XDR can then detect and respond to threats across your cloud environment, and provide visibility and context into your cloud workloads. The Cortex XDR Cloud per Host license is based on the number of hosts that run the Cortex XDR agent, regardless of the number of containers or functions on each host. A host is defined as a virtual machine, a physical server, or a Kubernetes node that runs the Cortex XDR agent. You can read more about the Cortex XDR Cloud per Host license and how to deploy Cortex XDR agent on Kubernetes clusters here1 and here2. References:

Cortex XDR Cloud per Host License

Deploy Cortex XDR Agent on Kubernetes Clusters as a DaemonSet