Take the Pulse of User Behavior with UAM
The first tool is user activity monitoring, or UAM, which is among the most effective solutions for reducing insider risk. It’s also a good starting point for understanding your cyber posture and whether you need additional protections.
UAM lets you monitor risky user activities and track trends in real time. The technology detects anomalous behavior that deviates from baselines and can help you understand user intent through context-sensitive analysis. It then prioritizes high-risk events on a per-user basis and provides comprehensive visibility for organizations to take appropriate action before breaches occur.
You can gain additional insight by integrating UAM with behavioral analytics to build holistic user risk scores. This is accomplished by ingesting UAM data and other complementary data sources to drive user behavior-based models. Risk scores allow organizations to identify unusual activity against a user’s baseline and when compared with a peer group with similar roles.
Further, this actionable intelligence enables automatic orchestration of different control points to close the loop and prevent data or system breaches. For example, if users are accessing a highly sensitive database from outside the country through a different VPN connection than they normally use, their risk score may increase. This would trigger external action from an identity and access manager to force a password reset and potentially alert their supervisor of suspicious behavior.
DIVE DEEPER: How should federal agencies implement identity and access management tools?
Remove the Malware You Can’t See
Much of the data your employees consume is in the form of text and image files such as Word documents, PDFs and JPGs. Cyberattackers can embed malicious code in these files. As users download and share infected files, they can become unwitting accomplices in cyber breaches across your network.
The solution is content disarm and reconstruction. As users download and share files, CDR intercepts them, captures the valid text and image code, and builds new, sanitized files that are free of malware. The deconstruction and reconstruction occur in near real time, without affecting employee productivity.
CDR is also useful for cyber analysts conducting forensics. When an analyst accesses a suspicious file, CDR presents the safe, reconstructed version. The original file is retained in quarantine as a forensic record.
Browse the Internet in an Isolated Manner
From health experts monitoring trends to intelligence agents tracking adversaries, many agency employees spend time scouring the internet. That potentially exposes them to malware embedded in websites.
Remote browser isolation lets employees access webpages but prevents hidden malicious code from reaching their devices. To users, it looks like they’re using their familiar web browser, but the RBI solution is isolating the web session to keep malware from getting through.
An effective RBI solution can work in two ways. Secure streaming delivers high-level protection in high-bandwidth use cases. Native rendering provides similar protection but with lower performance demands.