In the backdrop of increasing digitalization, the number of endpoints are also increasing. 

And as the number of employees, working both remotely and on-prem, have started using their personal devices for work, it has been highly critical to ensure that each and every device in the workplace is secured from misuses. In the modern IT environment, more devices are inter-connected for different tasks at different levels in the network. As a result, it results in more avenues for cyber attacks. The need for endpoint security management comes here.

Why is it getting increasingly important?

Almost 81% of organizations revealed that endpoint security is the ‘most sought after’ security in complex IT infrastructure today. The increase of BYOD practice has made data access more fluid in almost all areas in the IT ecosystem. 

The endpoint security management is built up on the foundation of three pillars where unauthorized and suspicious end-users are detected and prevented from allowing access to the critical enterprise network base. Post-detection, the IT threat detection team receives notifications about the login attempts so that necessary security actions are taken before it’s too late. In this regard, very often, the benefits of Endpoint Security are mistaken with the benefits of Anti-virus software. Endpoint security approach in an organization makes endpoints more responsible for security whereas anti-virus software just secures the network.

Where are the risks?

According to Forbes, 70% of the most successful breaches originate at the endpoint. In the current Work From Home (WFH) scenario, most of the employees perform critical IT tasks through internal networks from endpoints without any restriction. As a result, the access control risks rise exponentially. Since endpoints ensure interconnection of every device in the network, the vulnerability of cyber threats in and around the endpoints increase alarmingly.

What are the accrued benefits of Endpoint Security Management? 

An endpoint security management can ensure a unified approach to manage and secure endpoint devices. From the administrators’ point of view, the organizations can reap the following benefits with the right solution deployed at the right time:

1. Unified Governance — A robust endpoint security builds the framework to govern end-users accessing critical devices. 
2. Security against key cyber threats — Once endpoints are protected from key cyber threats, the IT environment becomes safer and customer engagement improves. 
3. Mitigate security gaps — Improved visibility of endpoints on the network periphery, eradicates security gaps that could have been the reason for security breach incidents. 
4. Application Blacklisting — It is extremely necessary to allow application access to the end-users based on daily use cases where the security mechanisms blacklist harmful or  useless applications in the network. 
5. Detects suspicious end-users — A robust endpoint security detects suspicious end-users in real-time and prevents allowing access to critical applications.
6. Enhances IT efficiency  – When endpoints are safe and secured from malefactors, the organizations can ensure an efficient IT environment 

Conclusion

Managing devices both on-prem and remotely raises serious security concerns and questions. Endpoint governance and robust access control policies help organizations to get rid of the endpoint vulnerabilities. Hence, it is time to reinforce strong endpoint security management.

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.

2021:  Security Expectations & Threat Possibilities

In the last three quarters, cybercriminals have capatlized on cyber vulnerabilities. Several incidents of data breaches, malicious activities and abuses of privileged credentials even in big enterprises have given nightmares to the IT security community. More than 80% organizations claim that the threat pattern has become more sophisticated and it is worsening in the passage of time.

So what is our expectation in 2021? Needless to mention, the entire world is praying for a secured ‘new normal’ and the cybersecurity policies must aggressively confront the risks. We need to brace ourselves with smarter mechanisms as more complex cyber threats are bound to unleash. ARCON, being a thought leader in the advanced IT security domain, have observed, identified, selected and prognosticated the below trends that could top the list of boardroom discussions in the coming days.

APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats): The malicious actors in this prolonged and targeted cyberattack gain illegal access to endpoints and remain undetected for an extended period of time and move laterally to exploit sensitive information.

The information includes financial records, intellectual property, business contracts, manufacturers’ and stakeholders’ identities. Even national defense plans, military strategies are prime targets of APTs. Considering the change in work environment, this threat can wreak havoc both on-prem and remote work conditions. Hence the chances of APTs are stronger in 2021.

While continuous malware detection and responses solutions such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Network Detection and Response (NDR) are very important to mitigate APT, A robust ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) tool can enable security and risk management teams to thwart attacks on sensitive data, thanks to its robust set of features that prevents unauthorized access to target systems.

Targeted attacks: The attackers in this type of threat compromise a target entity’s IT infrastructure for a longer period of time while maintaining anonymity. The most dangerous part of this threat is that the attackers often customize and modify their methods depending on the nature of the victims. Most of the organizations fail to circumvent the disaster as the source of the threat remains anonymous. The scenario turns worse when the malicious actors target privileged credentials with the help of undefined malware and eventually obtain illegitimate access to confidential data assets.

A robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution could safeguard organizations from targeted attacks by reinforcing user authorization, multi-factor authentication of the users and stringent password management policy where privileged passwords are randomized, rotated and changed frequently to maximize the security. Strong user authentication mechanisms prevent anonymous users from accessing the critical systems and applications at any point of time.

Remote Access Security: Almost 89% of the global workforce is working remotely today due to the pandemic. To ensure uninterrupted business processes, the organizations are imposing mandatory remote work culture. With obvious reasons the organized cybercriminals are continuously lured to exploit the vulnerable situations to reap maximum illegal benefits from the remote work processes.

ARCON Remote Access has already experienced a rising demand in most of the industries for Single-sign-on (SSO),  real-time monitoring and user restrictions capabilities. The privileged users in the enterprise network are allowed access to the target systems strictly on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis. Hence, it ensures that only legitimate IT users are accessing the critical systems in the entire IT ecosystem.

Cyber Insurance: The demand for cyber insurance will keep rising in 2021 as it covers cyber risks with a highly competitive monetary margin. Organizationals normally stumble to recover massive financial losses in a disastrous aftermath caused by data breach or cyber incidents. They might not always have adequate resources to recover. Hence cyber insurance is going to top the list of IT requirements in most of the global organizations.

In this backdrop, organizations would invariably try to reduce their premium on insurance policy. In order to do that, adequate IT security policies should be in place and the organization should be compliant to the global security standards like EU GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA etc. Deploying a robust and reputed Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution can help organizations to stay secured both financially and technologically.

Social Engineering: When we talk about social media, it seems that we are prying more into individual perspective. However, continuous monitoring of corporate social media accounts is going to be highly crucial in 2021. The cyber goons are not just targeting individuals but businesses as well since most of the organizations are promoting or doing their marketing activities through social media platforms to stay afloat in this challenging time. For example, a malicious actor’s post about hosting a webinar may seem to be a legitimate business activity. The main objective is to drive the visitors to any malicious website to siphon off personal information. If the user authentication and verification practices of the organization are poor then this might lead to disaster. Moreover, many organizations depend on third-party service providers who manage their social media accounts. Due to shared credentials and mutual access permissions, the risks double up. Lightweight password vaults and robust authentication can address these challenges.

UBA (User behaviour Analytics): Since remote work conditions are the ‘new normal’ of the IT world, monitoring users and analyzing their behaviour is going to be the top priority of a secured IT environment. The absence of a behaviour profiling mechanism is the reason behind data abuse, misuse of credentials and cyber espionage. Any anomalous end-user behaviour, majorly influenced by greed, wrong motive or revenge results in disruption of day-to-day IT operations and the overall business process. Digital workforce is expanding fast and simultaneously the number of endpoints and applications are also increasing. In this backdrop, continuous assessment of the users’ trustworthiness can prevent misuse of IT assets.

ARCON’s User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) tool helps organizations to overcome this ambiguity with a detailed report of all user activities performed on a given date and time to help the administrators take crucial IT decisions. With the help of real-time threat detection capability, this tool enables the security team to configure baseline activities as per rule and role-based policies. Moreover, the user access is granted with “Just-in-time Privilege” to restrict the duration of the activities and thus improves the overall access control mechanism of the IT ecosystem.

High demand for Cloud Security: For better technological and operational convenience, most of the industries are opting for the cloud-based IT infrastructure. It enables to quickly scale up data storage and data processing capacity as per organizations’ requirements. The flexibility of cloud storage helps to select where the organizations wish to run their systems. However, there might be chances of some grave security risks as poor access controls, absence of user authentication mechanism in the IaaS environment could invite heavy and permanent damage in 2021.

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) offers multi-factor authentication to ensure secure access to applications, databases, and cloud resources. It creates a robust shield around the privileged accounts to ensure secured access in the IaaS environment and prevent unauthorized access. Hence, security of the privileged credentials is highly imperative to ensure risk-free sessions. For more convenience, the comprehensive report of daily logins assures the risk management with a safe IaaS platform. A live dashboard depicting seamless monitoring of all the tasks is an additional benefit.

Final words

Like every year, we would like to retaliate our message of ‘prevention is better than cure’. We all hope for the best but it is wise to be prepared for the worst possibilities. To avert anything catastrophic, the stringent IT policies have to be in place and should be followed proactively. ARCON always believes in being proactive – not reactive. Happy 2021!

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.