Any business environment where users, hosts, and applications co-exist, is an opportunity for cyberattackers to exploit and extract your data.
As attackers become smarter, breaking into firewalls, sending you emails with malicious and infected attachments, or even bribing employees to gain access into your firewalls has become easier than ever. Old security tools and systems - that only focused on preventative methods - are quickly becoming obsolete, offering several ways to get past them. In fact, an attacker could be bypassing your security defenses as a blended “normal user” right now and you’d have no idea about it!
The situation is scary and ever-escalating.
Modern cybersecurity should be approached with an in-depth, layered methodology that focuses not only on prevention but also on detection and response altogether. To effectively avoid a data breach, detecting and responding to anomalous activity as quickly as possible is the need of the hour. And a modern User and Entity behavior analytics solution (UEBA) can help you with that.
What is UEBA?
As defined by Gartner, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) is a solution that utilizes analytics to form standard profiles and behaviors of users and entities (hosts, applications, network traffic, and data repositories) across time and peer group verticals. Any activity that deviates from these set standard baselines is automatically suspected to be anomalous. And such anomalies are applied with in-depth analytics to help discover threats in real-time along with “probable” incidents.
In a field where alert fatigue and talent shortage prevails, UEBA solutions provide actionable alerts that are easily understandable by security analysts at all levels. The analytics engine of a UEBA is an amalgamation of machine learning, behavior analytics, and threat modeling that allows your analysts to stay on top of the most significant security events. It enriches security data using strong and reliable context information that can help in increasing the accuracy of event detection, reducing false positives, and enabling context-based searching and threat hunting.
UEBA’s most common use case is insider threats; employees who have gone rogue, those who have been compromised, and those with access to your system who target attacks and fraud attempts, as well as servers, applications, and devices working within your system. Any person or machine that interacts with your company, system, platform, or product would supposedly be a subject of the tool’s behavioral analytics.
In order to select the perfect UEBA solution for your particular organization, you must look out for these 5 must-have features of a modern UEBA solution.
5 Must-Have Features of a Modern UEBA Solution
Multidimensional
A modern UEBA tool must be multi-dimensional, i.e; it must function towards bridging the gap between "anomalous" behavior and "malicious" intent. It should compile security data from multiple sources through event logs, deep packet inspection, and also external threat intelligence. This feature would allow your analysts to visualize a broader range of suspicious behavior and draw context across users, accounts, devices, and applications.
Customization
Your UEBA tool should enrich security data within the context of your organization’s ‘current’ processes, policies, assets, and user information (including user’s identity information, geolocation, roles, function). Based on this, it must offer your analysts the option to customize anomaly models and scores to help improve threat identification and intensity accuracy in case of changing environments. A customized UEBA solution would also optimize and reduce the number of false alarms generated during the process.
Use cases for different attack vectors
An advanced UEBA should include multiple use cases for attack vectors, IT assets, and scenarios. It should allow your security analysts to monitor the cloud, servers, storage devices, network hardware, and endpoints to detect different attacks including ransomware, phishing, insider threat, and DDoS attacks. It must also empower you to identify behavior-based irregularities (e.g., unusual machine access, unusual network activity) or pinpoint botnet or command and control activity (e.g., malware beaconing, etc.) and much more.
Human-Driven, Machine-Assisted
Your modern UEBA solution must compliment your security team’s knowledge of genuine malicious behavior patterns. Because although UEBA can detect any anomalous behavior, but whether the validity of the caught anomaly highly depends on what behavior it monitors. The collaboration between a UEBA’s machine learning algorithms and your analyst’s knowledge (of both enterprise local context and security heuristics) will help determine the overall effectiveness of a UEBA solution.
Moreover, it will accelerate the reduction of noise usually caused by unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning models.
Scalability
A modern UEBA solution must be scalable enough to satisfy the needs of modern organizations. Most organizations today have to collect and store terabytes of data flowing in from tens of variable data sources. So, for the UEBA solution to function effectively, it needs to monitor hundreds and thousands of hidden behavioral patterns (i.e; feature vectors) from this giant pool of data in order to automatically detect and correlate anomalies and find real threats. And only a UEBA solution designed for scalability can take this up justifiably.
If your modern UEBA solution can perform these above functions, you are well-positioned to obstruct internal or external risky behaviors and attacks. Let’s see how you can get started with a UEBA solution.
Getting started with UEBA
A modern UEBA security solution ingests data, configures workflows, targets use cases, and customizes your models. Here’s what you need to know about the 4 primary steps of getting started with UEBA
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Data ingestion
The first step in a UEBA methodology is to get data ingested into your UEBA tool. The data so collected can be from multiple sources and in a raw, structured, or unstructured form.
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Workflow configuration
Post establishing the data setup, next you need to configure workflows which will allow your analysts to respond quickly in case any anomalies are detected. These set workflows can be as customized as your security needs.
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Use case Prioritization
the third step in setting up a UEBA is to determine use case prioritization with the help of security architects and engineers. This should be done depending on the use cases that you would like to first address as an organisation, such as data infiltration, unauthorized account access, or a limit on downloadable data.
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Models Customization
The last step in getting started with a UEBA is to get your anomaly scoring models customized. These risk models and scores should be customized according to the threat intensity depending on your organisation’s security principles.
The UEBA tool is an intelligent solution that bridges the gaps between your security operations’ lack of skills and execution. The tool keeps learning and adapting to the changing environments of your organisational reforms and thereby ensures no threats go undetected in an situation- talk about perks!
Avoid headline-making cyber breaches with Binaryflux
Anomaly and threat detection are only one part of the cybersecurity story.
After detecting a suspicious threat, you need a modern security solution that qualifies, investigates, and neutralizes this threat. Binaryflux's Doppler is a UEBA embedded security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution that streamlines the whole threat investigation for you, through remediation and recovery.
With Doppler, you get the added benefit of a SOAR solution -
Case Management: to ensure you don't miss out on any incidents. Enable centralized investigations and secure team collaboration. Create or resolve a case, assign a priority, add collaborators, and track remediation efforts all automatically!
Automation and Workflows: automate analyst tasks, increase your productivity and accelerate incident response. Select automated playbook actions, approval-based response actions to review before resorting to any measure.
Want to know more about how Doppler keeps you safe with its advanced features?
Book a demo with us today!
