The term “real-time threat detection” refers to the continuous, automated monitoring of IT systems, networks, applications and data in order to identify security threats at the moment they occur. The objective is to detect attacks, anomalies or suspicious activities as early as possible, immediately inform security teams and – where feasible – trigger automated response actions before data loss, system compromise or business interruption occurs.
Continuous log and event monitoring: Ongoing collection and analysis of log data, network traffic, endpoint events and system messages in (near) real time.
Signature-based detection: Matching events against known attack patterns, malware signatures or indicators of compromise (IoCs).
Anomaly and behavioral analytics: Detecting unusual activities (e.g., suspicious login patterns, data access, network connections) based on deviations from normal user, system or application behavior.
Correlation and rule engine: Combining events from multiple sources (firewalls, servers, endpoints, cloud, OT systems) to identify complex attack scenarios, such as multi-stage attacks.
Threat intelligence integration: Incorporating external feeds with information on current threats, malicious IP addresses, domains or file hashes to improve speed and accuracy of detection.
Real-time alerting and notification: Triggering alerts via dashboards, e-mail, SMS, messaging systems or ticketing tools when threats are detected.
Automated response (e.g., SOAR/EDR capabilities): Automatically isolating endpoints, disabling user accounts, blocking IP addresses or reverting policies to contain threats immediately.
Risk scoring and alert prioritization: Rating incidents by criticality and relevance (e.g., via alert scoring) to help security teams focus on the most important alerts.
Dashboards & live monitoring: Visualizing security events in real time, including overviews of active threats, affected assets and current status information.
Real-time forensic data collection: Capturing contextual information (process history, network flows, user activity) for subsequent investigation of security incidents.
A SIEM system detects in real time an unusual number of failed administrator login attempts from a foreign country and raises a high-severity alert.
An EDR agent on a workstation identifies suspicious mass-encryption activity (indicative of ransomware) and automatically isolates the affected endpoint from the network.
A next-generation firewall blocks ongoing connections to a known command-and-control infrastructure after a threat intelligence feed has classified the IP address as malicious.
A cloud security solution reports that a storage bucket has suddenly become publicly accessible, generates an alert and automatically enforces more restrictive permissions.
An OT/ICS security solution in a production environment detects atypical control commands sent to a PLC (programmable logic controller) and stops this communication to prevent manipulation of the plant.
A web application firewall (WAF) detects SQL injection or cross-site scripting attempts in real time and blocks the corresponding HTTP requests.