User behavior analytics

What is user behavior analytics?

Given the widely known and harnessed power of data analytics, companies utilize all sorts of information on their customers for a variety of purposes. Many use this information to most efficiently allocate their marketing expenses. Another mechanism that has developed for the purpose of detecting the behavior patterns of optimal customers as well as suspiciously odd behaviors of app and website abusers is user behavior analytics software. With all the concern over a company’s security, insider threats happen to pose the biggest threat to a company, since they are already inside the system. User behavior analytics is not only the saving grace, but often also a better detector of outside threats constituting irregularities within a system. UBA identifies and flags when users are able to bypass DLP system limitations designed to prevent them from accessing privileged areas and engaging in prohibited activities.

All too often, employees engage in activity that abuses company resources or circumvents its policy to the enterprise’s detriment. A massive share of such activities go on unnoticed. In fact, fraud is typically only discovered many months after it is committed. User behavior monitoring software addresses this issue. What it does is process huge amounts of data resulting from user activity and detects patterns that would not be nearly as easily noticed manually. It helps distinguish who the “bad guys” are, as well as prioritize the magnitude of the abuse. Such factors that it takes into account is the time that a login occurs, when user rights are increased or decreased, as well as users’ lateral movement across servers. Such user behavior monitoring is also conducted in a very efficient way, it resolves issues faster, and does so in a way that ensures maximum ROI.

Collect accurate evidence automatically

Considering the sheer magnitude of all that information that analytics could process, it’s become a trend for a user behavior analytics platform to focus more narrowly on specific areas of attacks that could occur. For this reason, it is worthwhile to have a specific user behavior analytics tool that focuses on specific sets of capabilities that tackle common and priority areas of attacks. User behavior analytics software vendors offer such specialized programs as protecting against trade secret theft and funds misallocation. They focus on the normal things that users do on the system, when employees are accessing things that they wouldn’t normally access and doing so at abnormal times, when they usually arrive at and leave the office, as well as comparing all of an employee’s activities to his peers’ activities. Other anomalies that programs are designed to detect include an uptick in emails sent to an employee’s personal email, whether the employee is sending attachments in them, and the frequency at which the employee is working from home or from an unusual location. In many cases, users continue to carry out activities within an organization after already having been terminated from the job. Various activities are also detected in relation to one another in addition to such activities’ potential relationship to what other employees are doing.

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