Thanks to the growing complexity of networks, it's become all too easy for cybercriminals to infiltrate a corporate network and masquerade as an internal employee to evade external defences and remain undetected. This can allow the attacker time to freely steal sensitive data and cause untold amounts of damage to your organisation. User behaviour analytics exposes these stealthy attackers by establishing a baseline of normal behaviour and detecting patterns that deviate from this which likely indicate malicious activity. 

What is User Behaviour Analytics?

As the name suggests, user behaviour analytics (UBA) refers to the tracking, collection and analysis of user data and activities. By analysing raw data collected across sources from network probes and sensors to threat intelligence databases, a UBA solution can establish a baseline of normal behaviour for each user. When anomalous traffic patterns that may indicate a potential threat such as security breaches and data exfiltration are detected, the UBA solution notifies and provides cybersecurity teams with actionable insights to remediate the suspected threat. UBA solutions can be offered as a standalone option or as a supported functionality as part of a networking and security product like an intrusion detection and prevention system or a security information and event management solution. 

Functions of a UBA Solution

• Visualise risk - enhance visibility across access points with dashboards that tally alerts and provide trend graphs to understand the context and root cause of security incidents.
• Uncover threats and streamline investigation - leverage AI and machine learning to identify patterns of suspicious behaviour, eliminating the manual process of reviewing log data.
• Automate alerts - send access event details to third-party applications that accept incoming web hooks to notify administrators of suspicious events in real-time.
• Demonstrate compliance - report on access-related events and activities with in-depth reports for auditing purposes.

How can your organisation benefit from UBA?

UBA solutions simplify security management by automating the once manual and time-consuming processes of tracking, identifying and reporting on user activities, allowing your team to instead prioritise business-critical tasks. By monitoring the users on a network as opposed to a specific device or IP address, UBA solutions can also detect suspicious behaviour that may not otherwise be flagged by traditional perimeter monitoring tools, so no threat is able to evade your security team. And as compliance regulations continue to tighten in response to the ever-evolving threat landscape, by leveraging UBA your organisation can fulfil its regulatory responsibilities, including the prevention, remediation and auditing of any data breaches that affect your users and clients. 

How COOLSPIRiT can help

We strive to help our customers save valuable time, money and resources which is why we have partnered with best-in-class UBA solutions to support organisations of all sizes with their security needs. 

Contact our expert team today to learn more at 01246 454 222 or hello@coolspirit.co.uk.