Organizations commit a grave mistake by limiting the user behavior analytics only to outsiders. External attackers are not the only ones responsible for causing cyberattacks. Research suggests that 60% of all cyberattacks are due to insider threats. 

User Behavior Analytics is a tool that can quickly detect behavioral anomalies and respond to potential insider threats on time to prevent such attacks. 

Why are Insider Attacks Dangerous?

Detecting insider threats can be challenging, such that many threats go overlooked for months or years. In a 2019 report on advanced threats, it has been concluded that insider threats go unnoticed due to the lack of visibility into the normal user behavior baseline and the management of privileged user accounts, and thus become an even more attractive target for cyberattacks. An average insider data breach can cost as much as 3.86 million dollars, according to a report. 

Insiders already have legitimate security access to vital credentials, which is what makes them hard to detect. Insiders already know where the sensitive data is stored and often have high-security clearance. For an insider threat, your system needs to detect when an employee shows signs of suspicious or abnormal behavior. But what is considered abnormal in one case might not be the same for others, which makes the detection even harder. Fortunately, user behavior analytics makes detection much easier. 

How Does User Behavior Analytics Work?

User Behavior Analytics or UBA refers to a segment of data analytics that offers essential insights about customers’ and prospects’ behavior while interacting online. UBA provides an exhaustive profile of the end users’ actions on the system.

User Behavior Analytics can be effectively applied to cybersecurity to differentiate between a major data breach and ward off a potential attack for enhancing conversions and revenue. 

Leveraging aggregated behavioral data, it is possible to determine common user behaviors. This data is used as the foundation of the analysis which eventually creates a user behavior profile. The more information the software can collect, the better the scope to identify behavioral anomalies. 

The software is programmed to collect data about the programs accessed, websites visited, locations, and others. All this data is further used to create a unique employee profile or baseline, which is always being monitored. 

How can User Behavior Analytics be Beneficial in Cybersecurity? 

User Behavior Analytics can be constantly used to monitor the activities of employees all the time. The integrated software is designed exclusively to compare data collected in each unique employee profile. 

Smarter security monitoring:

User Behavior Analytics can be applied to other segments of cybersecurity as well. It can monitor the users, assets as well as network. Not only for understanding baseline user behaviors, but the tool can also derive fundamental data about the actions of prospects and customers. Simultaneously, it can alert the admins to statistical anomalies and help mitigate business risks. 

Generates essential insights:

A vast amount of data leads to a better scope of comparison. By asking the right questions, these anomalies can be spotted on time. Anything outside the ‘normal behavior’ spectrum can be spotted as abnormal behavior, indicating the possibility of an insider threat. 

Correlates data across systems:

Correlating data maximizes the utility of User Behavior Analytics in network security, deriving a broader picture of what is occurring within the organization, identifying the anomaly proficiently while allowing the security and risk management team to understand what credentials have been compromised. 

Opportunities for Advanced Analytical Models

Leveraging unsupervised analytics for security operations adds value as it automates the overall hunting process. The discovery of anomalies can be more efficient, which can be later turned into supervised behavior analytics. 

Therefore, simply applying one facet of the analytics is never enough. The application should be made to all the levels – network, user, and assets – to determine threats quickly before any malicious activity goes into action. 

ARCON presents state-of-the-art technology specially designed to mitigate risks related to IT infrastructure. ARCON | User Behavior Analytics (UBA) offers an efficient framework for better visibility and robust protection, simultaneously providing insights about anomalies. The ARCON | User Behavior Analytics solution offers essential tools needed to spot anomalies, presenting the ability to trigger real-time alerts.

Businesses, in particular, need to take drastic measures to prevent cybercrimes. Of all threats that pose harm to an organization, insider threats are considered the most dreadful. Unlike other security risks that occur from the outside of an organization, insider threats originate within the organization. The internal actors involved in malicious activities could be a board member, business partner, consultant, or a former employee. It doesn’t always mean that the individual must be a current member of the organization.

According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report generated in 2019, 34% of data breaches involved internal actors. So, it is a growing concern for businesses to keep their data protected not only from the outside entities but also from the internal entities.

No one can be trusted in this data-sensitive world. Businesses have to follow robust security measures and practices to keep their sensitive files away from any malicious employee. This is a highlight on insider threats and discusses on why it is a growing concern among organizations, and how to prevent them.

What are Insider Threats?

Insider threats are actually malicious behaviour by any vendor, an employee, an ex-employee, or even the janitor. Anyone who has valid access to confidential data files and network with malicious intention can be considered as an insider threat. The unfortunate reality about insider threats is that the people you trust with your systems and data are the ones responsible for them.

In other words, an insider threat can be seen as the potential of a company insider who had or has access to a company’s assets to use their access, either unintentionally or maliciously, to indulge in activities that could negatively impact the business.

Insider threat is also known as an insider attack as in some cases, the individual actually acts to compromise the organization’s computer system and network. Companies essentially focus more on tackling external threats, which makes them susceptible to insider threats. It could turn out to be a costly mistake if you disregard insider threats, leaving your sensitive information exposed. This is why it is vital that you understand different types of insider threats and what risks they pose so that you can develop a strategy to prevent or limit them altogether.

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Why is it risky for an organization?

Insider threats are the dangers inside the organization. They can be summarized in the following three drivers:

• Ignorance/ Accidental– Employees whose lack of awareness of procedures, protocols, and data security exposes external threats to the organization
• Negligent– Employees who weak approach to procedures, protocols, and data security exposes external threats to the organization
• Malicious Intent– Employees who intentionally exploit and misuse their privileges like special access to harm colleagues or company

Let’s understand the risks an enterprise could face due to insider threat with the following examples:

1. Multinational Bank: A malicious bank employee stole personal data and account information of 1 million users and provide them to a criminal organization
2. Global Beverage company: An insider stole a hard drive filled with information related to company secrets
3. Social Media: A malicious insider abuses his privilege to stalk women
4. Reputed Automobile company: A security engineer sabotaged the networks and systems and sold proprietary data to the competitors and third parties

These are enough to understand the risks associated with insider threats. To protect your employees, data, systems, and facilities, you must prioritize insider threats and it should be viewed as a shared responsibility among the teams. While you may not be able to prevent it from happening entirely, you can minimize its probability and manage the impact. For this, you will have to understand the types of insider threats.

Types of Insider Threats

While an insider threat strictly describes malicious behavior, there is a defined spectrum of insider threats. Insider threats vary significantly in intent, access level, awareness, and motivation, hence they are not all alike. With each of its types, there are several technical and traditional controls that you can take to bolster identification and prevention. According to Gartner, there are essentially four different types of insider threats. They are:

• Lone Wolf

As the name suggests, lone wolves prefer working independent. They act maliciously without any external manipulation and influence. If lone wolves have an elevated level of company privilege, they can be extremely dangerous. Job roles like DB admins and system administrators are highly likely to become insider threats. They should be monitored regularly regarding their activities. One perfect example of a lone wolf with Edward Snowden. He used his privilege to access classified systems and leaked information related to cyber espionage at the National Security Agency (NSA).

• Collaborator

A collaborator is someone who cooperates with third parties like competitors and uses their privilege to access information and provide it to the competitors. Such insider threats steal proprietary information, causing disruption to normal business operations. They do this for monetary gains as the third parties shower them lots of money just to provide them with insights. The insights could be anything from the audience demographics to product design, sales strategy, and more.

• Goof

Goofs are arrogant or ignorant users who do not act maliciously or show their intent but take potentially harmful choices. This type of insider threat believes it is exempt from security policies. It is surprising to know that the majority of insider accidents (about 90%) are caused by goofs. A goof can be a user or an employee who stores unencrypted personal information in a cloud storage account despite knowing that it is against the company’s security policy.

• Pawn

Pawns are users who are manipulated into doing malicious activities. In the majority of cases, pawns prove to be insider threats unintentionally via social engineering or spear phishing. An employee may download malware to their system or disclose important credentials to someone unimportant, and more. They do such things unintentionally, and this is why they are called pawns.

How to Prevent Insider Threats?

1. Monitor activity logs, emails, and files on your core data sources
2. Identify and determine where the sensitive files are stored
3. Find out who has access to particular files and data and who should truly have access to them
4. You are advised to establish and maintain a least privilege model within your business model
5. Apply security analytics and monitoring so that you are alerted on abnormal behaviors like increased file activity in sensitive folders
6. Educate and train your employees regarding the importance of data security

Conclusion

Insider threats are omnipresent. While you cannot completely eradicate it, you can take certain preventive measures to minimize the loss. The objective is to understand the security risks, both from outside or inside the organization. From implementing latest and advanced security measures to spreading more awareness among the employees about the new security protocol, being proactive and vigilant is the only way to prevent insider threats.

“Knowledge is power”-who is not aware of this universal truth? Not just in personal upbringing, but also in cybersecurity, knowledge is the master key to enrich ourselves. The ability to observe, know and analyze malicious IT/ cyber activities or threat actors encourages security professionals to do more R&D about the IT risks that organizations face.

In order to make that cyber knowledge usable, it requires a dedicated team with visibility of modern cyber security. Once cyber threat information is collected and evaluated from any given IT ecosystem of an organization, it is then analyzed by the cyber experts rigorously to create an environment that adds value to the IT risk assessment. This information is all about cyber threat patterns, extent of IT risks and vulnerable areas of IT security. Cyber Threat Intelligence reduces uncertainty for the stakeholders while seamlessly identifying threats and opportunities.

Cyber threat intelligence: Why is it gaining importance?

Cyber Threat Intelligence helps organizations to accumulate raw data about both emerging and existing cyber threats from different sources. After hair-split analysis of that data, the risk management team produces detailed reports to the management that contain strategic planning to automate and improve IT security control solutions. With this, organizations stay alert from the risks of APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats), zero-day threats and risks arising from malicious intent of the end-users.

The cyber threat intelligence team drives organizations to:

• Continuously update the volume of cyber threats, including the IT security vulnerabilities, probable targets of exploiting and the number/ pattern of malefactors.
• Helps organizations to be more proactive about cybersecurity threats rather than reactive in case of any cyber incident
• Ring the precautionary alert bell for the internal IT team, stakeholders and end-users in the enterprise network to keep informed about the newest threats and the potential repercussions on business continuity

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ARCON | UBA a robust Cyber Threat Intelligence Tool

To address the complex IT security use cases, the Information Security market today is sprawling with cyber threat intelligence tools.

Malicious end-users, however,  pose the biggest cyber threat. ARCON, being an industry leader in threat predictive and analytical tools, has therefore developed User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) solution that comprehends and analyzes the risky IT elements within the periphery by leveraging AI/ML. 

Deploying ARCON | User Behaviour Behaviour (UBA) tool mitigates IT risks arising from suspicious behaviour profiles and anomalous end-user profiles (insider threats). Both as a standalone and add-on solution (when integrated with PAM, this tool helps the IT security team to provide additional visibility on end-user anomalous activities. Moreover, the solution increases end-user productivity by configuring baseline activities. So, when they deviate, the solution raises an alert. 

ARCON | UBA assists IT security team by:

• Seamless monitoring of every end-user behaviour even in granular level
• Raising alerts of malicious activity on real-time basis  
• Providing detailed report of every IT task performed under supervision

Conclusion

Cyber threat intelligence has proved beneficial at every level of IT operations in an organization. The IT community in modern times counts on cyber threat intelligence because the behaviour-based analysis and structural analysis are assessed frequently. Strategically applied cyber threat intelligence can provide better insight into cyber threats and allows smoother, more targeted response to cybersecurity.

• Do employees/end-users resist IT process changes? If yes, then why?
• Why changes (even if necessary) in internal IT processes are not readily accepted by employees/end-users?
• How can organizations address employee/end-user concerns?

In two of our earlier blogs, we have discussed the reasons why people resist changes in the organization and how to overcome the challenge of resistance. In the last one year, there has been a sea change in the work culture of most of the organizations globally. Work-From-Home (WFH)  has been adopted by the majority of organizations due to the pandemic. 

Nevertheless, the changing dynamics in the IT landscape have increased access control challenges. This, in turn, has altered the IT policies and procedures that could lead to friction among employees. 

From a security and compliance perspective, reinforced access control is important, but for a frictionless IT environment a candid talk with the employees/ end-users is necessary. In this blog we discuss some major IT security trends and how the GRC managers can allay end-users’ concerns. 

Treading a balance between people and IT policies 

While most of the organizations are adopting robust remote access control technologies to address the challenge arising from WFH (Work From Home), the employees’ concerns are often ignored. The employees’ interpretation about the changed work culture, eg. What they are thinking about the new IT practices and procedures, are they facing any discomfort – all these questions remain unattended. Needless to mention, both the employees and the organization need to address these before it’s too late. 

Let’s discuss some of the IT practices that are important to IT security, but misconceptions among end-users could lead to ineffective implementation of the same. 

• Why Just-In-Time (JIT) Privilege?

About 75% of data breach incidents start with abuse of privileges across the world. In order to manage, monitor and control privileged activities in remote work conditions, organizations count a lot on the JIT privilege principle to avoid the risk of excessive standing privileges. Now, an end-user who had the liberty of all-time privilege might raise his/ her concern. Explain that to implement the JIT principle is not about reducing their liberty but to adequately protect endpoints and critical infrastructure from unauthorized access. The JIT practice reduces the privileged account attack surface.

• Why End-user Behaviour Monitoring? 

Many organizations are adopting predictive security mechanisms over preventive measures. Hence, continuous monitoring of the end-user behaviour is the best way to ensure improved vigilance. Implementing this security practice might throw a presumptive message to the employee that his/ her service is under observation and that they are being intruded on. Explain that end-users’ monitoring is not about intruding into privacy but to ensure everyone works on a configured baseline IT policy. It eventually helps to increase the end-user productivity. 

• Why Rule & Role-based Access Control?

The rule and role-based access control mechanism is the only way to ensure restricted and authorized access to systems. In a vast and distributed IT environment, especially in a remote work environment, organizations face the challenge to manage and monitor multiple end-users. The employees, at this juncture, might nurture a feeling whether their employer is denying the access due to mistrust? Explain that a role and rule-based access to systems enhances IT oversight and governance. This practice helps to implement the principle of least privilege for a robust compliance framework.

• Why Too Much of Authentication?

In today’s complex remote IT environment, it is important to find out whether or not the user activity is happening through a legitimate device. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) along with Adaptive Authentication based on some anomaly-detection criteria like geo-location, IP address or typing speed of the users helps the administrators to find out the suspicious user and take immediate action on it. The end-user may say that logging activity is causing too much frustration. Explain that in remote work environments, sophisticated cybercriminals can exploit the access control loopholes. MFA along with adaptive authentication is important to ensure network security. 

Conclusion

The employees can’t just be informed about the changes happening; the intimation of a change in policy/ technology should also include why these changes are happening and how the company would be benefited with this. This definitely reduces or alleviates the friction.

When it comes to protecting data exploitation and mitigating the risk, IT security professionals know that a majority of prominent threats does not come from malware attacks, instead, they are sourced from the behaviour of users of the system. Understanding this user behaviour can assist you in developing more effective strategies to prevent threats that are caused intentionally or inadvertently. In this detailed article, we discuss what UBA is and why businesses need it.

What is User Behavior Analytics?

Similar to any antivirus software which regularly scans files for any sign of threat, user behaviour analytics centers on scanning the actions performed by users within the systems. The objective of this identification and logging of data usage is to highlight as well as notify members of the security team about abnormal and potentially threatening activities. Although anti-malware software and firewalls do a good job in protecting attackers from exploiting the system, UBA works to identify the sign of such activities. Therefore assist the security team to be more agile and act quickly to the potential threats.

UBA logs users’ activities, and it will log:

• When Users will request access to the files
• When the requested files are accessed
• By whom the files were accessed
• How often the files were accessed
• All the activities associated with those files
• What was done to the data
• The time user logs the apps
• Which network they used to access
• What are their activities on the apps

5 Reasons why today’s Organizations need ARCON | UBA

Why is UBA important for every Business?

With cybercrime on the rise, companies need to leverage every possible method to protect their systems and data. Implementing effective user business analytics can assist companies in multiple ways including:

Detect Data Breach

Businesses collect sensitive data in a huge amount. You should be able to know who is accessing the data, what they are doing with it, where the data is being transferred, and everything else. The user behaviour analytics systems hold the potential to identify such things and alert you when they determine some unusual activities.

It does not merely detect outside activities, but UBA also keeps track of internal activities as well. There might be situations where an employee might go rogue and steal sensitive information by using his or her access. User behaviour analytics can assist you in identifying privilege abuse, sabotage, data breaches, policy violations, etc. Furthermore it allows companies to stay in compliance with the security guideline. It also facilitates more secure opportunities to work remotely.

Better Customer Understanding

One of the objectives behind collecting behavioral data is to understand the users. The data analytics allows you to identify user activities and understand what they are looking for. This allows you to create strategies that are more focused on their needs. Moreover, with relevant data as the bedrock of your strategies, you can eliminate the guesswork and focus on catering to the needs of your target users.

 Track Human and Machine Behavior

Normal behaviour for accounts utilized by humans will appear differently in comparison to the service accounts that are used to execute automated application activity. Moreover, these machine accounts have a lot of permissions, but their activities are more predictable as opposed to human user accounts. The activities of automated accounts are higher than human activities. When the user behaviour is tracked, it is prominent to identify which type of account is monitored when identifying the unusual behaviour.

Identity Brute Force Attacks

Cyberattacks at times, target the cloud-based units and third-party authentication systems. When you leverage UBA, you can identify many brute force attempts, enabling you to restrict access to such a unit. For companies that constantly monitor login failure, there is no sufficient time to go through an extensive list of accounts that generated these logins and determine the ones that are potentially threatening. An effective UBA tool can assist in prioritizing the accounts that create an unusual number of failed logins depending on the profile and offers contextual data to make an informed decision.

Reducing False Positives –

A great thing about UBA systems is that they continue to learn new ways to be more accurate and mitigate the chances of false alarms. This consistent approach mitigates the chances of false positives as various abnormalities must happen prior to alerting the analyst. UBA protects getting a series of false-positive alerts.

Tips for Improvement of ROI with UBA

Following are some effective tips to help you get most out of your UBA:

Determine Business as well as for Analytics Objective

Before you implement UBA, you have to determine the following things:

• What is the company working towards?
• What is the end objective?

Considering the business goals that you would want to achieve. Once you have established clear objectives, decide how you would work to achieve them. Set up key performance indicators or KPIs that you are focusing on improving to reach your goals efficiently. It is imperative to define the Business used thinking about analytics. This allows you to be clearer about what areas of the Business to focus on.

Create a Pathway that leads to your Goals

Critical paths are a series of actions that users take you to want the users to take when buying the products. For instance, in an e-commerce shop, this pathway could be –

• Searching the product
• Browsing the options
• Adding the preferred product to the cart
• Checkout
• Confirming the order

This will allow you to track the events that are important and cater to the goals of Business and analytics. In later stages, you can always add more events.

Arrange the Taxonomy

Behind every user behaviour analytics, there is an event taxonomy. This means the way businesses organize its collection of properties and events that it is using to define actions that people can perform within the products. Taxonomy is considered as the foundation for future analysis that the team will perform. This is why it is important to get it right.

Understand the Way Users are being Identified

A lot of analytics platforms need businesses to configure some type of identified, such as email or username in their HTTP API or SDKs for tracking the users. This allows you to align the data from different devices and sessions related to one user. Owing to this, it is imperative to ensure that the user id remains permanent.

Select Minimum Viable Instrumentation

Once you have determined how to establish your analytics as well as organize the events, the next step is to start analyzing the fundamental app metrics. This is the step where you integrate the SDK analytics solution and assign the users IDS. After this, you can start tracking critical paths and events to identify any threat possibilities and the necessary steps.

Final Thoughts

Every business, irrespective of its operational nature and industry is vulnerable to a cyber-attack. You cannot wait until you suffer from a data breach to implement the right security measures. Cybercriminals have become quite sophisticated and to protect your data, you have to be proactive and agile. If not, your business could suffer significant financial loss along with a damaged market reputation. User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) have become an important aspect of IT security as it determines abnormal activities. This allows businesses to treat the issues before they even enter the system. Investing in effective user behaviour analytics allow you to maintain operational efficiency and gain maximum return on your investment.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

Security has become one of the major concerns for almost all organizations nowadays. They have to undertake a number of measures to ensure their systems remain protected from any threats or intrusions. However, hackers and thieves always find a new way to break the security layer and enter the company’s network. This is where User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) can help companies out.

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about UBA before. We will learn here about what this concept is, how it helps companies in increasing security and its effects on decision making. Therefore, you will be able to understand UBA in and out. Moreover, you can then move on to implement it for your purpose.

Without further ado, let’s dig into the details and know more about UBA.

What Is UBA?

User Behaviour Analytics as the name itself describes what precisely the method focuses on, i.e., the behaviour of a user in certain situations. Basically, UBA monitors all the activities of a user to interpret any diversions from their usual functioning. This includes observing actions like:

• Network activity
• File accesses
• App launches
• Downloads

It is almost similar to how the firewalls and antiviruses work. Like they detect untrusted entries into the system, UBA identifies unusual behaviour of users in an organization. The significant difference between the two is pattern formation. Where firewalls and antiviruses simply look out for code bits, UBA forms general patterns in the users’ activities. Thus, it is able to quickly catch any abnormal movements within the network or the system.

Now, let’s see why more businesses are nowadays moving towards UBA instead of other security measures.

How can UBA help Businesses?

UBA must be providing some unavoidable benefits to organizations. That is why they have become more interested in this shielding concept. You must learn about these perks of implementing UBA so that you can use it for your purpose and make your business’s network and system more secure.

To understand the benefits, you should first be aware of the current security breach trends. The two main reasons why companies face security violations are:

• Remote Workforce: As more people have begun working from ‘outside the office area,’ they tend to use unsecured networks. Even if the employees secure their home networks, open connections from a coffee shop or a restaurant can’t be guarded. This gives an easy way for hackers to enter into their computers and ultimately to the organization’s system.
• Compliance: Every organization ensures that their employees are following their codes of conduct for security. However, the remote working has put a halt to it. Employees use different devices to access the business’s data. While this makes their work easy, it becomes difficult for the company to assure compliance towards security practices. It again provides easy access for the intruders to enter the systems and get what they want.

Now, these issues can’t be solved with regular inspection because by the time the checking will take place, the hacker would have already done their work. Plus, these intruders look like just another user in the regular records. That is why it will be difficult even for an IT expert to track them.

However, when we talk about UBA, it can conveniently handle both of these problems. It goes deep into the regular activities of every user to create a pattern. Through this, it is able to instantly detect and block an unusual action taken from the profile of that user. In short, the intruders don’t look like a general user to the technology, making it easy to track them.

UBA affecting Decision Making

Every organization has to take several security decisions every now and then. In this case, they won’t be able to take proper actions if they won’t know any intrusion is taking place. Hence, User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) plays a critical role in the company.

This technology can help security experts in decision making by alerting them of all the wrong activities going around the company’s system and network. Here are some of the general decision making advancements that can be seen with the implementation of UBA.

#1 Insider Threats

Insider threats are when someone from the organization itself is involved in the intrusion. It can be an employee or a group of employees. Usually, they either have personal motives, or they get paid to get the information out from the company’s system. Whatever may be the case, insider threat is the most significant danger to any business.

UBA here helps the system in looking after each employee’s actions. So when they access something they usually don’t, the system gets alerted. This way, problems like data breaches, privilege abuse, sabotage, and policy violation can be avoided at all scales. Plus, the experts can decide what to do with that specific employee.

#2 User Creation Or Permission Changes

Intruders sometimes create new “super users” or change the permissions for existing users to make their work more convenient. Any regular employee may not be able to notice it only until the data is gone or the problem becomes significant. But, on the other hand, UBA can easily track these changes and alert the security team about them.

Due to this early warning, the team can take action on time and avoid the intrusion altogether. The experts can even take proper measures to secure their systems from such invasions in the future.

#3 User Accounts Compromised

Employees can be too careless when it comes to security. Even though proper firewalls and antiviruses may be installed on their systems, sometimes these measures aren’t enough. This mostly happens when they themselves install malicious software on the device.

UBA can be of real help here because it can detect the changes in users before the malware creates significant losses. Therefore, security experts will know that one of their users’ accounts have been compromised, and they have to take proper action against it. This risky profile detection is highly beneficial in the current remote working environment.

#4 Access to Protected Data

UBA also keeps an eye on the protected data of the company. It tracks all users who regularly access the files and use them. So if someone new or unauthorized tries to get into the protected data, it will generate alters. This will help the security experts know that their confidential information has been accessed by someone it shouldn’t be.

Here, they can take proper actions and protect the files further so that no such intrusion will happen again. Moreover, they can keep an eye on certain loopholes in the security to keep the system more secure.

Conclusion

Nowadays, no big or small scale company is left hidden from the eyes of intruders and hackers. That is why every organization must take proper security measures to ensure their systems don’t get compromised. Here, the UBA serves the purpose efficiently. It helps the companies in keeping track of their users’ behaviour so that any unusual activities can be caught on time.

This way, the security experts can take the right action on time to avoid any significant damages. Further, the technology will also help them with their decisions made on the security aspect of the organization, ensuring no such intrusion takes place again in the future. Therefore, providing complete protection even against unknown and modern threats to the company.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

In the meantime, the security framework needs to be fine-tuned as several regulatory standards mandate reinforcing the cyber security posture. Access Control, authentication, behaviour analytics will be critical to address the growing challenges of the data breach. ARCON, being a global thought leader on risk management domain, has emphasized on three “must-have” security features that can ease off most of the information security worries among the organizations and make them security-ready for the coming year.

Trend 1: User Behaviour Analytics

Monitoring end-user behavior is going to be extremely crucial in 2020. Today’s IT environment is getting increasingly distributed in nature. The number of end-users is increasing rapidly and organizations struggle to manage and monitor user activities in the network periphery. Organizations create user entitlements but these are often misused by compromised insiders or third-party users. On many occasions, suspicious activities go undetected. Organizations mostly fail to detect anomalous activities inflicted by malicious insiders and suspicious third-party users. These tainted users are likely can inflict a heavy loss with the help of elevated permission like privileged access through which highly-critical information can be misused. 2020 is going to be a year when organizations will concentrate on predicting risks rather than taking preventive measures after the damage. Hence, a robust tool like User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) would be on top of IT security team’s preference list because it can predict and warn the IT administrators regarding possible threats well in advance underlying in the IT system. ARCON | UBA essentially uses machine learning, Artificial Intelligence to analyze behavioral patterns.

Trend 2: MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) with adaptive authentication

A single layer of authentication or even two-factor authentication to access confidential business information is no more reliable. In 2020, modern IT infrastructure demands advanced Multi-level authentication (adaptive authentication) layers that will strengthen the security structure. It is required because login credentials, OTP and biometric steps can be compromised. Also, the modern day IT environment is getting fragmented. As a result, both unmanaged machines and unmanaged users have spiraled up.

The mechanism of adaptive authentication is based out of the experience of past user behaviour which mostly happens through Geo location, Typing speed or IP address. This way it determines whether the user activity is happening through an authentic environment, else, the administrator is notified in no time. Thus, MFA with adaptive authentication enhances user experience with a robust validation mechanism that assures IT administrators about the authenticity of the users.

Trend 3: Fine-Grained approach to mitigate risks

As organizations adopt digitalization, it invites more number of users, many access points which eventually increases security risks. These risks can be mitigated with the help of rule and role-based access control policy which helps organizations to protect their systems from unauthorized access and unintentional errors. The fine-grained approach restricts and controls privileged users. ARCON | PAM provides the deepest level of granular control which restricts users by offering command filtering and command restricting capabilities including restricting users based on group wise, service wise, department wise, day wise, time wise, and duration wise to ensure secure, authorized and controlled access.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

A robust User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) tool could have prevented this disaster and a face loss. This tool seamlessly monitors the user activities and detect anything suspicious happening in the network. With the help of a centralized policy framework, UBA helps organizations to automate the entire risk-assessment process and construct a comprehensive security framework for an enterprise.

Benefits of ARCON | UBA

According to United States Cyber Security magazine, almost 49% organizations are still concerned about malicious insiders who are considered to be more dangerous than any external hacker. Hence, organizations allocate handsome annual budget to deploy a robust information security mechanism to combat newer emerging threats. With the vastness of shared and distributed environment, ARCON | UBA allows organizations to identify and spot suspicious user behaviour by comparing with the configured baseline activities. This tool is efficient enough to crunch huge amounts of data and trigger alerts to the administrators once any suspicious activity is spotted. The lucid live dashboard acts as a reporting mechanism that helps administrators to control the IT operations, governance and compliance requirements.

There is a say “Prevention is better can Cure”. Since Forensic Investigations cannot always reach the root-cause of any breach incident, thus it is highly crucial to incorporate a robust threat detection mechanism to find out if any malicious activity is happening in the network periphery. In a shared and distributed environment, it is absolutely impractical to monitor hundreds or even thousands of end-users in a typical IT setup. Hence, organizations look for a robust security framework that would seamlessly monitor the user activities in real time.

In order to meet this need, administrators need a mechanism that would allow them to identify end-user behavior activities. Today, in the age of sophisticated cyber threats, it is extremely challenging to predict IT risks. With the help of User Behavior Analytics (UBA), the security team can monitor, record, and assess all end user behavior profiles to help them in crucial decision making.

• Governance: With this, UBA aligns IT security policies with operations ensuring compliance.
• Performance Matrix: It evaluates the reasons behind the gap of deliverables and user output as a result of any deviation from baseline activities.
• Security: In the form of an additional layer of risk and fraud detection tool, it ensures that security framework is not compromised.
• Identify Unauthorized Access: UBA tool analyzes and monitors privileged user activities and blocks suspicious ones to prevent probable data breach.
• Mitigate Fraud Risk: It isolates anomalous user activities in real time and prevents information security threat.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.