Blog | August 19, 2026

“Avit has been hacked”…

…could easily have been the title of this blog… Because our environment was actually attacked by malicious code!

Extended Detection & Response (XDR) in Practice

Cybercriminals try countless ways to gain access to your system. In this case, during the ordering process on a website, the user was asked to perform an action for verification. It happens all the time, right? Just confirming that you’re not a robot? But what our employee didn’t realize was that his laptop then executed a malicious command, which could have had serious consequences for our entire company!

As a Managed XDR Specialist, we have, of course, implemented this Cisco tool in our own network environment.
“Don’t get high on your own supply” is a well-known metaphor that essentially means staying objective and not getting blinded by the success of your own product. But we do like to get “high” on the power of XDR, because we’ve now experienced it firsthand in our own network environment.

Our comprehensive Detection and Response tools map the entire digital infrastructure and combine data from multiple security layers. Our Secure Endpoint solution was the data source that flagged anomalous behavior. Both our SOC in Portugal and the system itself are trained to recognize malicious activity. As a result, complex attacks are detected more quickly, allowing for decisive action to be taken.

This took place within our XDR environment

Detection:
Anomalous behavior was detected on an employee’s endpoint.
The incident was logged within 3 minutes.
Response:
Our SOC specialist addressed the incident, investigated it, and decided to take action on the affected account. Within another 3 minutes, the account was isolated, the device was locked down, and the source of the attack was blocked across the entire environment.
The device was reset, and the employee was able to resume work within 40 minutes.

Half an hour for detection, 50 minutes for analysis: that was the norm with a traditional SIEM solution. With our XDR solution, the incident is already resolved within that same time!