Every attack touches a server. Are you watching yours?

Every serious attack — ransomware, BEC, data exfiltration — runs through your servers. They’re the objective, the pivot point, or both. If you aren’t watching what happens on those machines, you’re blind during the only window that matters.

Ransomware appeared in 88% of SMB breaches in Verizon’s 2025 DBIR. CrowdStrike reports 79% of attacks are now malware-free — attackers log in with valid credentials, use PowerShell, WMI, and RDP, and move laterally without dropping a binary. Average breakout time: 48 minutes. Fastest recorded: 51 seconds.

Why EDR isn’t enough

EDR catches malware and suspicious process behavior. But when an attacker uses your admin’s stolen credentials to RDP into a file server using tools that ship with Windows, the activity looks legitimate in isolation. Distinguishing a real admin from an attacker requires context that lives in the event logs: who connected, from where, when, and what they did — not just what process ran.

Start with the servers

If you have limited time and budget, deploy server monitoring first. The compliance-critical, attack-critical events — logon attempts (4624/4625), service installations (7045), RDP sessions (4778/4779), privilege escalation (4672) — all concentrate on your domain controllers, file servers, and systems handling regulated data. Over 50% of ransomware deployments execute within 24 hours of initial access. If you’re going to catch it, you have to be watching the servers.

Flat-rate server monitoring

Arden deploys to your Windows servers and immediately starts catching the attack patterns that real breaches follow — stolen credentials, lateral movement, persistence mechanisms, privilege abuse. It runs on your network at a fixed monthly cost, and everything stays local. If your auditor requires log monitoring (HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC, CJIS), Arden keeps your data on your hardware instead of sending it to someone else’s cloud.

The question isn’t whether Arden does everything Splunk does. It’s what happens if you deploy nothing. Read our guides on spotting lateral movement and detecting credential dumps, see what the hidden costs of a traditional SIEM look like, or compare SIEM pricing for 2026.