Managed Detection & Response · 24/7 U.S.-based coverage
Managed Detection and Response: detection that contains. Not detection that emails.
Your team needs to spot threats earlier, contain them faster, and keep critical systems monitored without standing up an internal 24/7 SOC. Cyberuptive delivers managed detection and response built around the modern attack chain, identity-first, endpoint-deep, with pre-authorized containment so dwell time shrinks instead of decisions waiting for a 2am phone call.
- U.S.-based analysts on staggered 24/7 shifts
- CrowdStrike + Trellix endpoint depth
- Identity attack coverage
- Pre-authorized active response
Why MDR
Speed of containment is the product.
The gap between detection and containment is where breaches happen. MDR collapses that gap. Our analysts don't just spot the indicator, they take the action while the attacker is still mid-chain.
Identity-first detection
OAuth abuse, MFA fatigue, conditional access bypasses: the modern initial access vectors.
Endpoint depth
CrowdStrike Falcon or Trellix EDR, with behavioral and IOC-based hunts running continuously.
Cloud workload coverage
AWS, Azure, GCP runtime monitoring with anomaly detection and drift alerting.
Active containment
Endpoint isolation, account disable, session termination, IOC block: all pre-authorized.
Threat intelligence
Trellix and CrowdStrike intel feeds correlated against your telemetry, not posted on a portal.
Plain English reports
Postmortems your CFO can read. Evidence packages your auditor can use.
Response matrix
Pre-authorized actions, by severity.
An example matrix from a recent customer onboarding, tailored to your environment during scoping.
| Severity | Example | Pre-authorized action | Notification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical | Confirmed ransomware execution | Endpoint isolation, account disable | Phone + email, immediate |
| High | Suspected credential theft | Force password reset, revoke sessions | Email + ticket, < 15 min |
| Medium | Anomalous OAuth grant | Block grant, alert user | Ticket, < 1 hr |
| Low | Suspicious scan against perimeter | Block IOC, monitor | Daily summary |
MDR vs everything else
What a managed detection and response provider actually does.
Four categories get sold interchangeably and priced as if they were the same product. They are not. The difference is who acts when something fires at 3am, and whether that action is contractually theirs or quietly yours.
| What you buy | What it gives you | Who contains the threat |
|---|---|---|
| SIEM | A place logs go, and rules that fire on them | You do. A SIEM is a tool, not a team. |
| MSSP | Device and tool management, alert forwarding | You do, after they email you. |
| Managed SOC | Staffed monitoring and triage across your estate | Shared, and it depends entirely on the contract. |
| MDR | Detection plus pre-authorized response on endpoint, identity and cloud | We do, inside an agreed severity matrix, without waiting for you to wake up. |
We will say the unglamorous thing: if you already have a capable internal security team and simply want more eyes overnight, a managed SOC engagement is probably the better value. MDR earns its price when nobody on your payroll is going to isolate a host at 3am.
Buyer's checklist
What to ask an MDR provider before you sign.
Ask us these. Ask our competitors these. The answers separate a real response capability from an alert forwarder with a nice dashboard.
01
Name the actions you will take without calling me first.
If the answer is none, it is not MDR. Ask for the severity matrix as a contract exhibit, not a slide.
02
What is your MTTD and MTTR, and what happens when you miss it?
An SLA without a remedy is a marketing number. Ask what the credit is.
03
Where do your analysts physically sit, and are they U.S. persons?
If you handle CUI under DFARS 252.204-7012, an offshore tier-1 queue is a finding waiting to happen.
04
Do I own my telemetry, and can I take it with me?
Detection content and log history built inside a provider-owned tenant is a switching cost engineered on purpose.
05
Is incident response included, or is it a separate retainer?
Many contracts cover containment but bill forensics and breach counsel support hourly, during the worst week of your year.
06
Which EDR are you locking me into?
We run on CrowdStrike or Trellix and will work with what you already own. A provider with exactly one answer is selling a licence, not a service.
07
Do you cover identity and cloud, or only endpoints?
Most mid-market intrusions now run through Entra ID and OAuth consent, where an endpoint agent sees nothing.
08
Give me two references on my compliance framework.
A provider with no CMMC, HIPAA or NCUA references for a regulated buyer is learning on your audit.
Escalation design
How escalation works between us, your IT team, legal and your executives.
Most breach post-mortems do not turn up a missed alert. They turn up an alert that reached somebody with no authority to act on it. We agree these paths during onboarding and rehearse them before they are needed.
Our SOC to your IT
Every action we take is already in the severity matrix, so this is notification rather than permission-seeking. Your team gets the host, the account, the action taken and the evidence, in the ticket queue you already use.
Our SOC to your named incident lead
Critical severity goes by phone to a named person with a named backup, not to a shared inbox. If we cannot reach either within the agreed window, we escalate and keep containing.
Incident lead to legal and privacy counsel
Regulatory clocks start early. DFARS 252.204-7012 gives you 72 hours to report to DoD, and NCUA expects notification within 72 hours of a reportable cyber incident. Counsel needs the facts while the clock is still young, so this trigger is defined by evidence type, not by executive comfort.
Incident lead to executives and the board
Executives need decisions, not telemetry: whether to pull a system offline, whether to notify a prime contractor, whether to engage the insurer. We supply the written impact assessment behind each of those calls.
We put this on one page during onboarding, with names and phone numbers in it, and revisit it every quarter. People change roles; an escalation path nobody has tested since the kickoff call is not a path.
Regulated environments
MDR for defense contractors and regulated industries.
In a regulated environment, detection has to produce evidence as well as containment. Every action our analysts take is logged in a form an assessor, an examiner or an underwriter will accept.
Defense contractors
U.S.-persons analysts only, which DFARS 252.204-7012 effectively requires wherever CUI is handled. Our monitoring evidence maps to the NIST SP 800-171 incident response and audit families, so it lands in your SSP rather than sitting beside it.
Healthcare and financial services
HIPAA Security Rule audit controls, GLBA Safeguards, and NCUA examination expectations all want demonstrable monitoring and a tested response plan. You get both, with the reporting an examiner asks for.
Cyber insurance renewals
Carriers now underwrite on specific controls rather than general posture. 24/7 monitored EDR with documented response is one of the few line items that reliably moves a premium or an exclusion.
If certification is the immediate pressure rather than detection, start with CMMC compliance. If the gap is that nobody senior enough owns these decisions, a virtual CISO is the cheaper starting point.
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How is MDR different from SOC as a Service?
Both are managed services with humans in the loop. MDR is endpoint- and identity-led with an emphasis on rapid containment. SOC as a Service is broader, it ingests every log source (network, cloud, identity, application) and operates a wider analyst function. We offer both, and the right answer depends on what you actually need to monitor and how much in-house IT capacity you have. Most defense and regulated mid-market customers run a SOC service that includes MDR capabilities.
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What stack runs your MDR?
CrowdStrike Falcon for EDR, Trellix endpoint and threat intelligence, and Microsoft Defender for endpoint coverage in M365-heavy environments. We choose the stack per-customer rather than forcing one tool.
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What kind of response can you take?
Endpoint isolation, account disable, IOC block, session termination, password rotation. Every action runs against a pre-authorized response matrix you sign off on during onboarding, so we're not waking your team at 2am to ask permission to contain a known-bad endpoint.
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Do you cover identity attacks?
Yes, and you should make sure any vendor you talk to does. Identity is the dominant initial-access vector in 2025-2026 incidents. We monitor authentication telemetry, conditional access bypass attempts, MFA fatigue patterns, and OAuth grant abuse: across Microsoft Entra and Okta.
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Is MDR enough for CMMC?
MDR alone is not enough for full CMMC Level 2 compliance, but it covers the SI (System & Information Integrity) and IR (Incident Response) family controls and feeds the AU (Audit) family with response logs. Pair MDR with our CMMC service for end-to-end coverage.
Let's talk MDR
Ready to move from alert email to active containment?
Whether you're scoping a CMMC assessment, evaluating a managed SOC, or just trying to get through your next audit: we can help. No sales theater, no hand-offs to anonymous tier-1 queues.
Third-party proof
The receipts. Trellix, AWS, and Harvard Business Review on the record.
Trellix and AWS publicly document how Cyberuptive operates managed detection and response with Trellix XDR and Amazon Bedrock generative AI, and Harvard Business Review features the same architecture as a case for using AI to scale security operations.
- Read on trellix.com →
Trellix.com
Cyberuptive Customer Story
Trellix documents how Cyberuptive uses Trellix XDR and AWS Bedrock to automate investigations, cut response time, and scale a 24/7 managed SOC.
- Watch on aws.amazon.com →
AWS Partner Success
Trellix XDR for automated threat hunting and triage
AWS features Cyberuptive using Trellix XDR to hunt threats, correlate logs with threat intelligence, and triage with generative AI on Amazon Bedrock.
- Read on hbr.org →
Harvard Business Review
Generative AI for Security: Harnessing Amazon Bedrock for Customer Impact
HBR features Cyberuptive in its coverage of Amazon Bedrock and generative AI applied to real-world security operations.
Managed Detection and Response, explained
What is Managed Detection and Response, and why containment is the product, not detection.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a 24/7 service that combines endpoint and identity telemetry, threat-hunting analysts, and pre-authorized containment actions into a single operating contract. The defining feature isn't the detection technology, every vendor has telemetry these days, it's whether the contract gives someone the authority to act on what's detected, in your environment, while the attacker is still in the middle of the attack chain. A managed detection and response service that emails you an alert at 0200 and waits for you to wake up isn't MDR. It's a managed SIEM with a friendlier dashboard.
MDR vs. EDR vs. SOC-as-a-Service: where the lines actually fall
The acronyms blur because vendors blur them intentionally. The cleanest distinction: EDR (Endpoint Detection & Response) is the tool, CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Trellix EDR, that produces and analyzes the telemetry. MDR is the human service that operates the EDR (and ideally identity, cloud, and network signals too) 24/7 with active response authority. SOC-as-a-Service is the broader contract that includes MDR plus log aggregation across non-endpoint sources (firewalls, applications, custom logs), threat intelligence integration, compliance reporting, and often vulnerability management. Most regulated mid-market organizations need SOC-as-a-Service with MDR capabilities embedded, one provider, one playbook, one bill.
For a deeper side-by-side including SIEM and MSSP terminology, see our MDR vs MSSP vs SIEM 2026 Buyer's Guide.
What "containment" actually looks like during a real incident
A representative real engagement: at 02:14 HST, our EDR flags a workstation executing a known credential-harvesting payload chained behind a phishing-driven OAuth grant from earlier in the evening. Within 90 seconds, the on-shift analyst confirms the indicator against the threat intel feed, validates it isn't a sanctioned penetration test or a red-team exercise, and executes the pre-authorized response: endpoint isolated at the EDR layer, user account session-revoked and password-reset-forced in Entra ID, the malicious OAuth grant revoked, and an IOC block pushed to the firewall. Total elapsed time from alert to full containment: under 4 minutes. The customer's IT lead gets a phone call, not an email, at 02:22 HST with the incident summary already complete. The post-mortem ships within 48 hours with timeline, evidence, root cause, and the policy changes needed to prevent the same path. This is what managed detection and response should do; in the broader industry it is what MDR is supposed to do but routinely doesn't.
Common MDR failure modes, and how to spot them in a sales conversation
Five patterns show up across vendors that talk a good game but underperform in practice. "Notify-only" contracts: the SOC alerts but does not act, the response matrix is empty, or every action requires customer approval at the moment of the incident. By the time approval comes, the attacker has moved laterally. Tier-1 ticket churn: alerts are triaged by junior analysts running playbooks; anything not in the playbook gets escalated through a queue, adding hours of dwell time. No identity coverage: the MDR is endpoint-only and misses the OAuth grant, MFA-fatigue, conditional-access bypass, and Entra ID role-abuse attacks that drive most 2025-2026 breaches. Threat intel as marketing: the "threat intelligence" is a PDF posted monthly, not feeds correlated against your telemetry in real time. Offshore analyst rotations: overnight coverage is staffed in jurisdictions where CUI / ITAR / GCC High data handling is non-compliant. For DoW subcontractors this is a contract-breaking issue and you should ask explicitly during scoping.
How MDR maps to your compliance obligations
The same managed detection and response telemetry that catches threats also produces the audit evidence your assessors expect. For CMMC 2.0 Level 2, MDR satisfies the SI family (System & Information Integrity) controls SI.L2-3.14.1 through 3.14.7, the AU family (Audit & Accountability) for log generation and review, and the IR family (Incident Response) for detection, analysis, and reporting. For NIS2, the same controls satisfy Article 21(2)(c) (incident handling) and 21(2)(d) (continuity). For HIPAA, §164.308(a)(1)(ii)(D) on review of information-system activity and §164.312(b) on audit controls. For PCI DSS 4.0, requirements 10 (logging), 11 (testing), and 12.10 (incident response). One service, four frameworks of evidence, produced as a byproduct of the security work, not as a separate documentation effort.
Further reading
Analysis from the team that runs the SOC.