Key Takeaways
Remote and unmanaged endpoints create major visibility gaps that attackers actively exploit through credential theft, fileless malware, and LOTL techniques.
Fidelis EDR delivers on-device behavioral detection without VPN dependency, maintaining visibility even when endpoints are off-network.
The Endpoint Collector enables 90-day retrospective threat hunting, forensic investigations, and IOC correlation across distributed environments.
SIEM/SOAR integration, YARA scanning, and remote live response help SOC teams accelerate containment and reduce dwell time.
Most enterprise security teams can describe their managed endpoints accurately. They struggle to account for everything that is actively connecting to corporate resources right now. Contractor laptops with no MDM enrollment. BYOD devices accessing SaaS platforms through personal networks. Remote employee workstations that have not touched the corporate VPN in two weeks. Shared lab machines with no agent. All of these are live access points. Most generate no telemetry, no behavioral data, and no alerts.
The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report[1], which analyzed over 22,000 security incidents, found that infostealers compromised 46% of unmanaged devices holding company credentials. Third-party device involvement in breaches doubled year over year, reaching 30% of all confirmed cases. Credential abuse and vulnerability exploitation together drove 42% of initial breach vectors. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report[2] puts the global average breach cost at $4.44 million, with U.S. organizations hitting a record $10.22 million per incident.
Those numbers trace back to one root cause: endpoints that security teams cannot see cannot generate the alerts that stop attacks.
This guide covers the Fidelis EDR deployment strategy for these environments specifically. Architecture, deployment phases, detection engineering, incident response workflows, and SIEM/SOAR integration. Written for security architects, SOC leads, and CISOs evaluating endpoint detection and response for a distributed, hybrid workforce.
Why Traditional Antivirus Software Fails Against Modern Endpoint Threats
Two separate problems make legacy endpoint security inadequate for remote and unmanaged environments. The first is detection architecture. The second is network dependency. Both need to be understood before evaluating any EDR deployment strategy.
Signature-Based Detection Cannot Stop What It Has Never Seen
Traditional antivirus software is built around one assumption: someone already identified the threat and generated a signature. Against modern sophisticated attacks, that model fails structurally.
The Picus Red Report 2026[4], covering analysis of 1.1 million malware samples, found that 80% of the top ten MITRE ATT&CK techniques actively used in attacks focus specifically on defense evasion. Fileless malware executes entirely in memory using native Windows tools: PowerShell, WMI, certutil.exe, mshta.exe. Nothing lands on disk. Signature scanners have nothing to match. Ponemon Institute research confirmed that fileless attacks are ten times more likely to succeed than file-based attacks. Traditional antivirus software generates zero alert for these techniques because there is no file to scan.
Living-off-the-land (LOTL) attacks extend that evasion further. Attackers use legitimate Windows binaries to move laterally, escalate privileges, and establish persistence. Every process involved is a native OS tool. Detecting this class of attack requires behavioral analysis of process context, parent-child relationships, command line arguments, and outbound network connections. Capabilities that endpoint protection platforms built on signature matching simply do not provide.
The 2025 Verizon DBIR confirmed that vulnerability exploitation surged 34% year over year. VPN appliances and edge devices were specifically called out as primary targets. Traditional security measures address none of this effectively.
VPN-Dependent EDR Tools Leave Remote Endpoints Exposed
Many first-generation EDR tools assume managed network access. The agent sends telemetry through a corporate-controlled path. Detection logic runs server-side. When the endpoint goes off-network, the agent goes partially blind. Events queue. Detection gaps open.
For remote employees on home networks, contractors on personal ISPs, and traveling staff across time zones, that architecture creates exactly the window attackers exploit. An endpoint compromised while off-VPN may not surface detection events until it reconnects. By then, data exfiltration may already be complete and lateral movement already executed.
CISA’s 2025[3] Year in Review documented that in FY2025, the agency scaled endpoint detection and response deployment to more than 60 federal agencies covering over 500,000 endpoints through its Persistent Access Capability program. The explicit reason cited: continuous on-device visibility is a prerequisite for detecting advanced persistent threats in near real time. That requirement applies equally to enterprise environments.
Establish Deep Telemetry
Enable Timeline-Based Investigation
Continuously Validate Endpoint Visibility
Fidelis Endpoint® Architecture: Built for Off-Network and Unmanaged Environments
Understanding how Fidelis Endpoint® is built explains why it handles remote and unmanaged environments where other tools fall short. The architecture has three core components: the agent itself, the Endpoint Collector, and the telemetry it gathers.
Single Lightweight Agent, On-Grid and Off-Grid Detection
Fidelis Endpoint® deploys one lightweight agent across Windows, macOS, and Linux. No VPN connection is required for detection to function. Threat intelligence and detection logic are pushed locally to the agent at deployment. Detections fire on-device regardless of network state.
When an endpoint loses connectivity, the agent continues monitoring locally, caches events and queued jobs, and syncs everything to the Endpoint Collector once reconnection occurs. A remote employee targeted by a phishing-delivered macro while on a hotel network still triggers detection. The behavioral pattern was observed on-device. The alert fires. Response can begin as soon as the device reconnects or while it is still isolated.
Agent-to-server communication uses TLS 1.2 encrypted WebSocket connections. The channel is persistent and lightweight by design, avoiding meaningful competition with business application traffic on bandwidth-constrained connections.
Endpoint Collector: Centralized Behavioral Telemetry Store
Every agent feeds into the Endpoint Collector, a centralized repository for endpoint behavioral metadata. The Collector stores process starts and stops, parent-child process relationships, registry reads and writes, file creation and modification events, DNS lookups, HTTP and HTTPS connections, network socket activity, and Windows Event Log entries.
Retention is configurable at 30, 60, or 90 days. NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC 2.0 Level 2 guidance specifies a 90-day minimum telemetry retention baseline for audit and incident response requirements. Fidelis matches that directly.
The stored metadata enables retrospective analysis. When a threat surfaces today, analysts query what happened on any endpoint 60 days ago without depending on SIEM log completeness or network tap coverage.
What the Fidelis Agent Collects Per Endpoint
Telemetry CategoryData Captured
Process ActivityStart/stop, command line arguments, parent PID, file hashFile SystemCreated, written, modified, closed, deleted eventsRegistryKey reads, writes, deletionsNetworkDNS queries, HTTP/HTTPS, remote IPs, socket connectionsWindows EventsLogon events, account changes, service installationsMemoryLoaded DLLs, injected threads, process memory stateExecutables and ScriptsFirst-seen copy of every binary and script executed
The executable and script collection deserves specific attention. Fidelis saves a copy of every binary and script the first time it executes anywhere in the environment. Attackers routinely delete tools post-execution. With this collection active, analysts retain the sample for hash analysis, threat intelligence correlation, and cross-environment scoping, even after the attacker has cleaned up on the endpoint.
Fidelis EDR Deployment Process: Five Phases to Full Coverage
Deploying Fidelis Endpoint® across a mixed environment of managed, remote, and unmanaged devices follows a predictable sequence. Skipping phases or rushing through them is how coverage gaps persist. Each phase builds on the one before it.
Phase 1: Endpoint Inventory and Risk Tiering
Pull authentication logs from your identity provider. Every device that authenticated to corporate resources in the past 90 days is in scope. Cross-reference that list against MDM enrollment records and your current EDR coverage map. The gap between those three datasets is your actual unmanaged endpoint exposure, and it is almost always larger than asset inventory reflects.
Prioritize deployment by risk tier: systems with access to sensitive data or production infrastructure first, remote worker endpoints second, contractor and shared devices after that. Fidelis dynamic groups update endpoint group membership automatically based on device attributes, removing the manual maintenance that causes policy drift across large deployments.
Phase 2: Agent Deployment at Scale
Push agents through SCCM, Group Policy, Ansible, or Intune, whichever software distribution infrastructure already exists. For endpoints outside managed deployment reach, the agent installer ships through self-service onboarding portals or gets built into contractor access agreements as a condition of network access.
For devices where agent installation is genuinely not possible, Fidelis Network® provides compensating network-level visibility: asset profiling, OS fingerprinting, and behavioral anomaly detection for unmanaged network-connected systems. That does not replace agent telemetry. It does eliminate the complete blind spot that would otherwise exist for those devices.
The agent supports renaming and hiding from the endpoint UI through the management console, relevant for parallel evaluation environments or deployments requiring low end-user visibility.
Phase 3: Detection Tuning and Behavior Rule Configuration
Deploying agents without tuned detection logic creates alert volume that overwhelms analysts. The Fidelis Threat Research Team maintains a behavior rule library covering known adversary TTPs mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. These rules deliver detection coverage on day one. Plan a two-to-four week tuning window to whitelist legitimate administrative activity and reduce false positive rates before the rule set stabilizes.
Custom behavior rules build directly from Endpoint Collector query results. When an analyst identifies a suspicious pattern during investigation that no existing rule covers, that query converts into a live detection rule without code. Investigation findings feed directly into detection coverage. That feedback loop is how the rule library grows from real operational data rather than published threat intelligence alone.
Phase 4: Threat Intelligence Integration
Most enterprise threat intelligence programs are fragmented across formats, vendors, and internal teams. Fidelis Endpoint® normalizes all of it into a single correlation pipeline.
The platform ingests threat intelligence in STIX, XML, JSON, and delimited file formats. Three streams feed it simultaneously:
Fidelis Insight is the native feed from the Fidelis Threat Research Team, continuously updated through cloud-based sandboxing, machine learning anomaly detection, and active threat research.
Third-party and community feeds normalize through the same ingestion pipeline. ISAC feeds, commercial TI subscriptions, and partner-sourced indicators all land in one place and correlate against endpoint telemetry automatically.
Internally developed intelligence covers indicators and behavior rules built from your own investigation and incident response findings. These tend to be the highest-fidelity indicators because they are specific to your environment and the threats already targeting it.
Here is what makes this operationally significant: all three streams correlate against both real-time events and historical metadata. A new indicator added today retroactively queries your full 90-day retention window. Past activity matching a newly published threat actor IOC surfaces without a separate re-investigation. That retroactive correlation is something most SIEM-only environments cannot do without significant manual effort.
Phase 5: SIEM and SOAR Integration
Fidelis Endpoint® integrates with IBM QRadar, Micro Focus ArcSight, and McAfee Enterprise Security Manager through syslog export. A REST API covers any platform outside that list.
The bidirectional integration is where operational value concentrates. When a SIEM alert from network telemetry points to a specific endpoint, a pre-defined Fidelis response template automatically initiates live response collection on that endpoint, captures running processes and open connections, and pushes results back to the SIEM interface. The analyst sees enriched endpoint context in the same tool without switching consoles. For SOAR platforms, the REST API exposes full programmatic control: endpoint isolation, process termination, file collection, and forensic data capture become automated playbook steps rather than manual analyst actions.
Endpoint Detection Engineering: How Fidelis EDR Catches Advanced Threats
Detection coverage in Fidelis Endpoint® comes from three distinct mechanisms, each addressing a different threat class. Knowing when to use which is what separates effective detection engineering from a system that either misses too much or generates too much noise.
Behavior Rules vs. IOC Matching: When to Use Which
IOC-based detection catches known threats at speed. A confirmed hash, IP, or domain correlates against endpoint telemetry in milliseconds. The hard ceiling is that IOCs describe threats after someone has already been compromised. Against zero-day attacks and unknown threats, IOC matching contributes nothing to detection.
Behavior rules detect attacks based on what they do, not what they are. A rule that flags any PowerShell process spawning a child that connects outbound to a non-corporate IP catches a wide range of malware families without knowing their specific indicators. That detection logic holds when attackers rotate C2 infrastructure and change payloads, because the behavioral pattern persists across variants.
The Fidelis Threat Research Team continuously maintains this rule library. Analysts extend it from their own Endpoint Collector investigation results. That direct path from analyst finding to production detection rule is the operational loop that keeps coverage current against emerging threats.
YARA Scanning and the OpenIOC Indicator Library
When a new threat actor report drops, most SOC teams spend hours manually checking whether any of the published indicators exist in their environment. Fidelis shortens that to minutes.
OpenIOC and YARA indicators imported into the Fidelis Scanning Indicator Library run ThreatScans across endpoint file systems and memory from a single task definition. One import, one scan job, results across the entire enterprise.
Beyond basic IOC matching, Fidelis Endpoint® supports the full YARA module set, including the PE module for inspecting executable internals. This matters because hash-based blocking fails when attackers recompile a payload. A YARA rule targeting structural characteristics, such as specific imported cryptographic functions common to ransomware families, blocks execution before it starts regardless of hash value. New variants from the same campaign get caught even when the hash changes between runs.
Process Blocking Independent of AV Engine Choice
Process blocking in Fidelis Endpoint® operates independently of whatever antivirus engine is deployed. Add hashes for immediate execution blocking without touching AV configuration. Apply YARA rules to scan executables pre-execution. For organizations where replacing an existing AV investment requires a multi-quarter procurement process, Fidelis EDR adds prevention capability now without waiting for that cycle to complete. Process blocking works on Windows, macOS, and Linux through the same policy interface.
SOC Incident Response Workflows Using Fidelis Endpoint®
Fidelis Endpoint® is built to work the way SOC teams actually operate: fast triage, retrospective hunting, remote forensics, and contained response. Each workflow below maps to a distinct phase of incident handling.
Alert Triage: Full Context at Detection Time
When a detection fires, the Fidelis event timeline surfaces the complete behavioral chain of the suspicious process: parent process, every child process created, network connections established, files written, registry keys modified, DLLs loaded. The full context appears in one view. Analysts do not query separate data sources to reconstruct what happened.
For most alerts, this collapses triage from an hour-long investigation to a five-minute review. That compression is what keeps a limited-size SOC functional under real detection volume.
Threat Hunting With Retrospective Endpoint Data
Threat hunting in Fidelis Endpoint® uses the Endpoint Collector Boolean query builder. Analysts express complex hypotheses and run them retrospectively across the entire managed endpoint estate. Find every endpoint where PowerShell executed with an encoded command and then established an outbound connection to an external IP in the past 45 days. That query runs across all endpoints simultaneously.
The executable file and script collection supports a parallel hunting workflow. Analysts review first-seen binaries in the built-in hex or text viewer, check them against Threat Lookup for cloud-based multi-scanner ratings, or download samples for sandbox submission. Cerberus, the built-in binary triage tool, scores unknown executables on first-order characteristics: digital signature validity, packing status, and imported OS functions. That score prioritizes which unknowns warrant sandbox time before committing analysis resources.
Remote Live Response and Forensic Data Collection
Fidelis Live Console provides direct remote access to an endpoint’s disk, files, registries, and processes without physical access to the device. For a distributed workforce, that matters more than almost any other capability.
Live response collections complete in minutes: running processes, open network sockets, recent DNS contacts, recently executed applications. This initial dataset confirms or closes an alert before heavy forensic collection starts. Most alerts resolve at this stage, which keeps forensic resources free for confirmed incidents.
For confirmed compromises, forensic collection options include:
Full disk images in E01 or S01 format for traditional forensic processing
File collections filtered by date, path, extension, hash, or content, wrapped in AD1 forensic containers that preserve filesystem metadata and are cryptographically verifiable
Full memory capture in RAW or AFF4 format for Volatility-based offline analysis
Process-specific memory dumps with granular control over which artifacts to collect, including handle data, thread info, and VADs
Live memory analysis returning parsed results directly from the endpoint, surfacing hidden processes and injected DLLs without a full memory dump
All of this runs remotely. That is the practical point for enterprise teams: a confirmed compromise on a laptop in another country does not require shipping the device or dispatching a responder. For a lateral movement incident touching 20 hosts, batch collection across all of them from one task definition is what makes the response timeline realistic.
Endpoint Isolation Without Losing Investigation Access
Confirmed threat. Fidelis Endpoint® isolation cuts the endpoint from the network within seconds. Lateral movement stops. Exfiltration stops. The management console connection remains active. Designated forensic workstations can still communicate with the isolated endpoint. Investigation and collection continue while the device is fully contained. Analysts do not choose between stopping the threat and preserving forensic access.
Vulnerability Management, Zero Trust, and Continuous Monitoring
Fidelis Endpoint® maintains a continuously updated software inventory per endpoint and correlates it against the MITRE CVE database and Microsoft KB articles in real time. When a new CVE publishes affecting software installed in your environment, the platform generates an alert. That is a fundamentally different posture than periodic vulnerability scanning: exposure is visible as a live signal, not a point-in-time finding.
The 2025 Verizon DBIR identified vulnerability exploitation as 20% of initial breach vectors, up 34% year over year. Edge device and VPN appliance vulnerabilities were specifically called out. Continuous software inventory correlation closes the gap between vulnerability publication and organizational awareness.
For zero trust alignment, NIST SP 800-207 Tenet 5 requires that enterprises continuously monitor and measure the security posture of all assets. Fidelis Endpoint® delivers that: patch status, AV engine state, active processes, vulnerability exposure, and behavioral indicators are all available in real time. Those signals feed into ZTNA policy engines for dynamic access control decisions. The on/off-grid agent architecture aligns directly with VPN-less access models where endpoint security cannot depend on network connectivity assumptions.
How Fidelis Prevent, Detect, and Respond
Threat Prevention and Intelligence
Investigating, Hunting, and Forensics
Enterprise Deployment Considerations
Bandwidth impact: The persistent WebSocket connection is lightweight under standard monitoring conditions. Full disk image collections are large and should run off-peak or throttle for remote endpoints on constrained connections. Targeted file collections and live response datasets run with minimal bandwidth impact on standard broadband.
Performance on endpoints: Brief resource spikes occur during active forensic collections. The agent uses OS scheduling to avoid interfering with foreground workloads. For performance-sensitive endpoints, test collection timing against those workloads during initial deployment before enabling aggressive collection schedules.
Role-based access controls: Fidelis Endpoint® RBAC limits which scripts each analyst role can execute, which endpoints they can query, and what system-level permissions they hold. Junior analysts handle triage. Senior analysts run forensic collections. Threat hunters get access to full query and hunting capabilities. Alert subscriptions route by severity to email, Microsoft Teams, or Slack based on role, so critical detections reach on-call responders without being buried in lower-severity volume.
Coexistence with existing security tools: The Fidelis AV engine is optional. Fidelis Endpoint® runs alongside existing antivirus investments without conflict. Process blocking operates independently of AV engine choice. Organizations that cannot replace existing endpoint protection platforms immediately add endpoint detection and response capabilities without disrupting current tools.
Conclusion: Fidelis EDR Closes the Remote and Unmanaged Endpoint Gap
Remote and unmanaged endpoints are not edge cases in 2025 enterprise environments. They are the dominant reality for most organizations. The 2025 breach data reflects it directly: infostealer compromise of unmanaged devices at 46%, doubled third-party breach involvement, and credential abuse as the leading initial access vector. These figures trace back to endpoints that security teams cannot monitor.
Fidelis EDR deployment addresses the structural problems. On-device detection without VPN dependency closes the remote endpoint visibility gap. Ninety days of behavioral metadata in the Endpoint Collector enables retrospective analysis that SIEM log completeness rarely matches. First-seen executable and script collection preserves forensic evidence that attackers try to erase. Behavioral detection catches LOTL attacks and fileless malware that signature-based traditional antivirus software misses entirely. SIEM and SOAR integration connects endpoint response into broader security workflows without forcing a full stack replacement.
Security teams that extract full value from this deployment run it as a detection engineering platform. They build custom behavior rules from investigation findings. They use retrospective queries for proactive threat hunting. They close the loop between forensic analysis and prevention policy. That operational discipline, on an architecture built to support it, is what compresses dwell time and limits the blast radius when a breach occurs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Fidelis Endpoint® require a VPN connection for threat detection on remote endpoints?
No. Detection logic and threat intelligence are pushed locally to the agent at deployment. Detections fire on-device regardless of network state. Events cache locally when offline and sync to the Endpoint Collector automatically on reconnection.
Can Fidelis EDR deploy alongside an existing antivirus solution?
Yes. The Fidelis AV engine is optional. Process blocking runs independently of whatever AV engine is installed. Fidelis Endpoint® and existing antivirus investments operate without conflict.
What operating systems does Fidelis Endpoint® support?
Windows, macOS, and Linux through a single-agent architecture.
How long does Fidelis Endpoint® retain behavioral telemetry?
30, 60, or 90 days, configurable per organization. NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC 2.0 guidance specifies 90 days as the minimum baseline for audit and incident response requirements.
Can forensic investigation continue after an endpoint is network-isolated?
Yes. Isolation maintains the management console connection and can allow access from designated forensic workstations. Collection and investigation continue while the endpoint is fully contained on the network.
How does Fidelis handle devices where an agent cannot be installed?
Fidelis Network provides compensating network-level visibility through asset profiling and behavioral anomaly detection for unmanaged devices. This does not replace agent telemetry but eliminates the complete blind spot for unmanaged network-connected systems.
What threat intelligence formats does Fidelis Endpoint® ingest?
STIX, XML, JSON, and delimited file formats. Native Fidelis Insight feeds, OpenIOC, and YARA indicators all normalize through the same ingestion pipeline and correlate automatically against endpoint telemetry.
How does Fidelis EDR support zero trust architecture requirements?
Continuous on-device monitoring provides real-time endpoint health signals that feed into ZTNA policy engines. NIST SP 800-207 Tenet 5 requires continuous asset posture monitoring. Fidelis Endpoint® satisfies that requirement without depending on network connectivity assumptions.
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