I see a lot of hate ITT on kernel-level EDRs, which I wouldn’t say they deserve. Sure, for your own use, an AV is sufficient and you don’t need an EDR, but they make a world of difference. I work in cybersecurity doing Red Teamings, so my job is mostly about bypassing such solutions and making malware/actions within the network that avoids being detected by it as much as possible, and ever since EDRs started getting popular, my job got several leagues harder.

The advantage of EDRs in comparison to AVs is that they can catch 0-days. AV will just look for signatures, a known pieces or snippets of malware code. EDR, on the other hand, looks for sequences of actions a process does, by scanning memory, logs and hooking syscalls. So, if for example you would make an entirely custom program that allocates memory as Read-Write-Execute, then load a crypto dll, unencrypt something into such memory, and then call a thread spawn syscall to spawn a thread on another process that runs it, and EDR would correlate such actions and get suspicious, while for regular AV, the code would probably look ok. Some EDRs even watch network packets and can catch suspicious communication, such as port scanning, large data extraction, or C2 communication.

Sure, in an ideal world, you would have users that never run malware, and network that is impenetrable. But you still get at avarage few % of people running random binaries that came from phishing attempts, or around 50% people that fall for vishing attacks in your company. Having an EDR increases your chances to avoid such attack almost exponentionally, and I would say that the advantage it gives to EDRs that they are kernel-level is well worth it.

I’m not defending CrowdStrike, they did mess up to the point where I bet that the amount of damages they caused worldwide is nowhere near the amount damages all cyberattacks they prevented would cause in total. But hating on kernel-level EDRs in general isn’t warranted here.

Kernel-level anti-cheat, on the other hand, can go burn in hell, and I hope that something similar will eventually happen with one of them. Fuck kernel level anti-cheats.