Maximizing Your Cybersecurity Investment: Evaluating and Implementing Effective UEBA Solutions

The third and final post in our series on user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) explores the benefits of using behavioral analytics solutions, including machine learning (ML) and UEBA. We will discuss how UEBA dynamically adapts to your environment, providing advanced detection capabilities and enhancing your cybersecurity strategy. Additionally, we will provide a comprehensive list of factors to consider when evaluating UEBA solutions for your organization.

In this article:

• 6 benefits of using behavioral analytics solutions
• 10 factors to consider when evaluating UEBA solutions
• Conclusion

6 benefits of using behavioral analytics solutions

1. Detect breaches of protected data — UEBA can detect unauthorized access, alteration, copying, or deletion of protected data by integrating with other security tools and alerting you when such events occur.
2. Detect insider threats or credential compromises — UEBA can help identify data breaches, sabotage, privilege abuse, and policy violations made by your staff, as well as detect adversaries compromising system administrator credentials.
3. Flag changes in permissions and creation of privileged users — UEBA alerts you when privileged users are created or when accounts are granted unnecessary permissions, helping you detect abnormal account creations based on the user’s or role’s baseline.
4. Detect brute force attacks — UEBA can detect identity-based attacks, such as phishing and brute force, and block access to targeted entities, providing an additional layer of security.
5. Reduce unnecessary alerts — By constantly learning and adapting, UEBA helps pinpoint which events or alerts are standard or expected in the system, helping the analyst focus on substantive threats.
6. Focus on threat-centric use cases — UEBA solutions help you discover security threats that traditional solutions, based on signatures, correlation rules, or simple statistical analysis, may miss.

10 factors to consider when evaluating UEBA solutions

Many vendors claim to offer UEBA capabilities, but a variety of implementations make comparative evaluations difficult. The list below can help your organization evaluate and select an effective UEBA solution.

1. Shows normal activity as well as anomalies
2. Connects a host-to-IP-to-user for establishing identity automatically
3. Detects lateral movement
4. Creates timelines of all incidents automatically
5. Deploys and shows value quickly
6. Evolves to meet future needs easily and without additional costs
7. Deploys without giving VPN access to the vendor
8. Does not require agents or network taps to be deployed
9. Provides proactive threat hunting capabilities
10. Integrates with SOAR for automation

Conclusion

UEBA offers a dynamic and adaptable approach to cybersecurity, detecting subtle changes in behavior and providing advanced detection capabilities. By considering the factors listed above, you can ensure that you select an effective UEBA solution that meets your organization’s needs and enhances your overall cybersecurity strategy. A robust UEBA solution will not only enhance your security posture but also streamline your security operations, ultimately empowering your organization to stay a step ahead in defense.

This comprehensive guide was created to help organizations evaluating UEBA solutions better understand it and how it can be adopted to improve your overall security posture with faster, easier, and more accurate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR).

Read the eBook for a deep dive on:

• What UEBA is and why it is needed
• How UEBA is different from other security tools
• The different types of UEBA solutions
• Factors to consider when evaluating UEBA solutions
• Threat-centric use cases