Modern Network Detection and Response (NDR): 5 Use Cases for the Modern Enterprise

In recent months, a prestigious global law firm was forced to shut down for several weeks in the wake of a cyberattack. Ongoing case work was interrupted and trials ground to a halt. The firm struggled to pinpoint which pieces of sensitive data had been viewed and exfiltrated. Because they couldn't see the full scope of the breach, their response was delayed, leading to unprecedented damage to the organization’s reputation and financial stability. The root cause? A critical blind spot in their network. In the absence of the right network insights and context, identifying and responding to sophisticated threats becomes a near-impossible task, leaving organizations vulnerable.

The Power of Network Insights

The network is an unrivaled source of security insights because it provides a complete and definitive record of all digital activity: It captures every connection, every data transfer, and every interaction, creating a definitive chain of evidence to uncover the who, what, where, when, and why pertaining to what’s happening at any given moment.

It’s also immutable. It can't be compromised or disabled by threat actors the way logs and endpoint agents can.

The extensive collection and analysis of this network data is what really gives the ExtraHop modern network detection and response (NDR) platform its competitive edge, making it a critical component of a robust cybersecurity strategy.

“What makes ExtraHop unique in NDR is that it monitors the network through multiple lenses such as the applications, the network and application performance (which can be a security issue or a bottleneck of some sort), and an elevated risk profile. Visibility off the wire, user behavioral analytics, context of atomic events, and a holistic view of the network beyond security are additional contexts that end users can draw from to improve the health of their network.” –IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Network Detection and Response 2024 Vendor Assessment, doc # US51752324, November 2024

With this deep insight, security teams can supercharge their operations and support a multitude of critical use cases that can help them to quickly detect and understand threats, accelerate decision-making during investigations, and better protect their organization against whatever comes their way.

Lateral Movement Detection

What happens when an attacker makes their way into your network? They begin to move laterally, quietly spreading to find valuable data, escalate privileges, or unleash ransomware. This internal navigation often mimics legitimate activities, making it incredibly hard for traditional security tools to detect. The longer they go unnoticed, the more catastrophic the damage.

Detecting lateral movement is your best shot at stopping an attack before it escalates. Catching an attacker in this phase means containing the breach to just the initial compromise, preventing widespread data loss, system outages, or significant financial and reputational harm.

To truly protect your organization, continuous internal network monitoring for unusual behaviors is essential. But simply observing network traffic isn't enough; you need to genuinely see into it and understand its contents and context.

That's why ExtraHop excels at detecting suspicious activity and lateral movement. Our modern NDR platform decodes and understands 90+ protocols at wire speed to differentiate legitimate network use from attacker misuse—even when threats are cleverly hidden within encrypted channels or common protocols like MS-RPC, remote desktop protocol (RDP), and server message block (SMB). This deep visibility ensures you're not just watching traffic flow, but comprehending its true intent.

ExtraHop can help distinguish between a legitimate IT admin accessing 5 servers during maintenance hours versus an attacker accessing 50+ servers at 3 AM using stolen credentials. This precision comes from analyzing an action’s velocity, timing, sequence, and context—creating behavioral footprints that your team can review and act on.

Proactive Threat Hunting

Traditional threat hunting, relying on endpoint forensics and logs, is good for known threats. But these methods fall short against unknown attacks or clever adversaries who bypass them.

Network-based threat hunting is now vital. Unlike endpoint or log data, network packets provide an unchangeable, comprehensive view of all network traffic—the "ground truth." This empowers security teams to hunt for behavioral indicators and uncover "unknown-unknowns.”

ExtraHop takes this network-based approach to the next level. While many NDR providers derive their insights from metadata—which offers only partial information— ExtraHop’s modern NDR platform collects and analyzes full packets. This difference is profound: while metadata tells you who communicated with whom, when, and how (IP addresses, ports, protocols, timestamps), it doesn't tell you what was communicated.

This depth is essential for discovering zero-day exploits and advanced persistent threats (APTs) that use novel techniques. With an unalterable, forensic view of all network traffic, you can retrospectively analyze traffic for patterns or behaviors once a new threat is identified, even if it occurred months ago, delivering a definitive source of truth and unparalleled visibility for all your security investigations.

Our motto? If something happens, it's in the packets.

Performance Monitoring

In today's hyper-connected, digital-first world, downtime isn't just an inconvenience; it's a catastrophic business event. Even the briefest disruption can instantly erode customer loyalty, damage your brand's reputation, and lead to significant financial losses. This reality makes effective network performance monitoring crucial for ensuring continuous service availability.

ExtraHop elevates traditional performance monitoring, offering unparalleled network visibility, streamlined workflows, and essential context to swiftly troubleshoot and resolve network performance and application issues before they become major business crises.

ExtraHop achieves this by harnessing real-time wire data. Unlike traditional tools relying on logs or agents, it passively observes and analyzes every network transaction, providing complete visibility across your entire hybrid environment. This granular, protocol-aware analysis automatically discovers devices and dependencies, creating an always up-to-date map of your environment.

This deep forensic visibility is enriched with essential context. ExtraHop intelligently correlates billions of metrics, highlighting anomalies and pinpointing bottlenecks, mapping them directly to specific users or services. Combined with streamlined workflows and guided investigations, operations teams gain immediate, actionable insights.

Blast Radius Analysis

In the aftermath of a cyberattack, the terrifying reality is a profound lack of clarity around the scope of the breach and its potential impact – the blast radius.

In these types of situations, security teams are often compelled to shut down entire networks without clear insights into the full extent of the breach. This extreme response halts general operations for organizations, leading to substantial business disruption and tangible financial setbacks. ExtraHop’s modern NDR platform dramatically strengthens your ability to respond to a cyberattack, creating a visualization that shows which assets are truly compromised and which remain untouched. With highly targeted quarantine capabilities, you can isolate only infected segments of the network, leaving critical and unaffected operations fully intact.

This level of precision also expedites recovery efforts, bypassing time-consuming guesswork and broad system rebuilds, so you can instead support focused, targeted remediation activities.

Identity-Based Attack Investigations

Last year, 88% of breaches involved stolen credentials, according to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report.

Threat actors are increasingly weaponizing user identities to carry out their attacks, exploiting identity directory services like Active Directory to leverage stolen credentials and then moving often undetected within your network. Cloud environments multiply the number of accounts, devices, and services that can be targeted. Since every attack path eventually comes back to who has access to what, identity has become the attacker’s primary battleground.

Without clear visibility into who is behind suspicious network actions, it becomes difficult to connect the dots of an attack, assess the full impact of a compromise, and efficiently investigate incidents.

ExtraHop helps organizations overcome these challenges by providing SOC analysts the network visibility they need for a complete picture of an attack based on user identities, allowing them to see which devices were accessed and any detections that they have triggered.

By decrypting and analyzing network traffic -including Active Directory-, ExtraHop provides best-in-class defense against identity-based threats, including brute force attacks, credential harvesting, and forged credentials. Streamlined workflows built into the ExtraHop platform empower security teams to leverage this enriched user data as a central pivot point for investigations. Our evolving identity capabilities empower security teams with the clarity and context needed to understand "who" is behind network activity, enabling faster, more confident investigations and stronger security outcomes.

Modern NDR for Stronger Security

The threat landscape isn’t slowing down – adversaries’ attacks are growing in volume and worsening in terms of impact, while security budgets and resources remain constrained. In this environment, organizations need solutions that deliver maximum protection without multiplying complexity or overhead. Effective network security requires comprehensive visibility into all activity. Modern NDR solutions transform raw network data into actionable intelligence, empowering teams to make informed decisions and supporting a wide range of security use cases and needs.

As attack sophistication increases and business dependencies on digital infrastructure deepen, the organizations that survive and thrive will be those with the most expansive and proactive threat detection capabilities.