Securing Against Unknown Threats with UEBA

Knowledge of how to secure a computer doesn’t bring complete cybersecurity to the entire company and all its staff members. Attackers can break into firewalls, send you e-mails with malware attachments, and at worst gain the trust of your employee to get access to crucial business information. Installing an antivirus program in your servers, data center and other devices used by employees may provide security against “outside” threats. But most of them will fail against insider threats. A malicious intruder within an organization, a compromised employee, accidental misuse, or abuse of storage or network resources by users may open gates to massive data breach disaster.

69% of organizations reported incidents of attempted data theft by internal threats according to Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 2017. The same report also aggregated that 91% of firms report inadequate insider threat detection programs.

Why Does Traditional Antivirus Fail Against Advanced Threats?

Old antivirus solutions are failing dramatically and are becoming obsolete. Attackers have devised new strategies to get past them.  Here are some strong reasons to change your old antivirus software immediately:

• The nature of threats has changed significantly over the years
• WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks have proved that the traditional security systems and procedures are redundant. Ransomware is no match for traditional Antivirus players
• The traditional Antivirus fails to process, analyze and identify patterns, errors, and security holes in the large amount of data flowing in a network
• Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) inject themselves into your systems to communicate and control data flowing your computer network.
• Attackers have devised advanced malware with machine learning capabilities to remain undetected. They can create botnets to cause havoc on your IT infrastructure.

With advanced threats on the rise, companies need effective analytical and monitoring tools that can increase the efficiency of the current security infrastructure. To prevent against insider threats, they need to deploy a behavior-based authentication suitable for providing access to systems.

What Is UEBA?

User and entity behavior analytics, or UEBA, is a trending cybersecurity process that identifies users exhibiting risky behavior. It understands the attributes of user behavior like typical access patterns and code-of-conduct infractions to prevent bad actors from accessing your critical assets. It can be embedded in applications and network to work with endpoint devices for analyzing their usage patterns.

User behavior analytics first evolved in the field of marketing. It helped companies to understand and predict consumer-buying patterns so that they can upgrade their products for customer needs. But with security systems providing so much information that it became tough to uncover data having the potential for real attacks, use of analytics tools made sense. UEBA tools specialize in security analytics by focusing on the behavior of systems and the people using them.

How UEBA Works?

UEBA tools identify patterns of human behavior by applying machine learning algorithms to detect meaningful anomalies from normal usage patterns.

For example, if a particular user repeatedly requests to download the same 10 GB file in a single day. Similarly, if a malicious attacker makes dozens of failed login attempts, the UEBA system would be able to detect this anomaly and alert system administrators immediately.

UEBA tools deploy anomaly sensors on end systems of an organization. A single sensor can, for example, track the external links clicked by a user. Information like this is then fed into machine learning algorithms for statistical analyses in order to identify any dangerous access pattern. UEBA can also aggregate the data present in real-time reports, logs, as well as analyze the backup files and flow of data packets within a network.

How UEBA Helps in Cybersecurity?

UEBA enhances your cybersecurity solutions to expose insider threats, compromised accounts and privilege misuse in real time. The following points highlight how UEBA helps in cybersecurity in your organization:

• It collects security-related information from diverse sources to provide clean sets for effective analytics
• You can obtain a true view of the identity of users to see how, why and where they are using your services
• Helps in detecting known and unknown threats by applying full-spectrum analytics
• IT uncovers compromised accounts through deep behavior profiling to discover the imposter
• Provides powerful data visualizations and easy interface to accelerate threat qualification and investigation
• It tracks unauthorized data access & exfiltration
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve detection and response to threats
• Cloud security monitoring to discover if your cloud-based assets are indicating they have been compromised or are showing anomalies from regular behavior

Conclusion:

If the attackers are getting smart, it’s time for you to get smarter as well and realize that the basic security practices and measures are no longer enough.

Cybersecurity is not only a question of developing defensive technologies but offensive technologies as well.

-Donald Trump

Your security systems should be able to detect the presence of an outsider as well as insider quickly in order to minimize the damage. The AI-powered UEBA tools use machine learning to strengthen your IT security. Ultimately, monitoring behavior patterns will not only help you in detecting anomalies but can also help you in improving your products and services according to the need of your users.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.