User Behavior Analytics Help IT Security Streamline Threat Detection

Thanks to Vivin Sathyan, Product Manager at ManageEngine, for taking me through the addition of user behavior analytics (UBA) to ADAudit Plus during their user conference in Chicago.

Insider threats continue to challenge organizations of all sizes, and detecting them requires establishing a baseline of normal activities specific to each user over an extended period of time and reporting any deviations from the norm.

It is not humanly possible for IT security professionals to perform those detection tasks, which is why insider threats fly below the radar of solutions that don't use UBA. With its user behavior-based model, ADAudit Plus can detect potential insider threats and automatically notify concerned personnel.

False positives — alerts that indicate the presence of a threat that does not actually exist — are the leading cause of delayed breach detection. According to a survey published by SANS Institute in June 2017, only half of the respondents detected breaches in less than 24 hours. False positives can be reduced by setting thresholds specific to each user based on their level of activity rather than using a blanket threshold across the organization. This is another task that's impossible for IT security professionals to manually perform.

Caught between setting lower organization-wide threshold values and triggering more false positives — or configuring higher threshold values and missing a breach — security teams often choose the former. With its dynamic alert thresholds, ADAudit Plus reduces the number of false positives and buys ample time for security teams to focus on the real indicators of compromise.

UBA in action — ADAudit Plus applies machine learning to create a baseline of normal activities specific to each user and only notifies security personnel when there is a deviation from this norm. For example, a user who consistently accesses a critical server outside of business hours wouldn't trigger a false positive alert because that behavior is typical for that user. On the other hand, ADAudit Plus would instantly alert security teams when that same user accesses that server during a time they've never accessed it before, even though the access falls within business hours.

"Because of its superior threat detection capabilities, UBA should be a part of any organization's security framework, which is why we've incorporated UBA capabilities into our product," said Sathyan. "Combine this with ADAudit Plus' real-time auditing capability and a provision to configure the tool to act automatically in the event of a breach, and you have a formidable threat detection and response tool at your disposal."

Developers and security professionals can explore the UBA capabilities of ADAudit Plus by downloading a free trial at http://ow.ly/RLsRy.