The Benefits of UEBA Technology with Industry Experts at the Helm

Best-in-class security technology complements great expertise, and vice versa. To significantly improve your security posture, you need both.

User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) technology is a game-changing development for the cybersecurity industry. These tools allow security policies to evolve beyond the application of static rulesets and detect a far wider range of suspicious activities in the enterprise.

Rules have been synonymous with security information and event management (SIEM) since the very first SIEM 1.0 solutions appeared on the market in the mid-2000s. Over time, new features like improved log management and better alert categorization made these tools more valuable for enterprise IT leaders, but static rulesets remained the norm.

Only recently have the cracks of SIEM 1.0 technology begun to show. Even the most sophisticated set of security rules regularly fails to detect insider threats and compromised accounts. It’s easy to see why: how do you catch someone who is supposed to be where they are?

Next-generation UEBA platforms like Exabeam offer a complete break from SIEM 1.0 capabilities. Instead of relying on rules, these tools build baseline profiles of every user and device in your network, and then generate alerts when their activity deviates from the established norm.

Behavioral insights enhanced with machine learning

This new approach would be prohibitively costly and time-consuming without emerging technologies like machine learning. Requiring security experts to design, implement, and maintain behavioral profiles manually simply isn’t cost-efficient at the enterprise scale. It would require diverting thousands of employee hours per month away from other critical security tasks.

Next-generation UEBA platforms automate many of these tasks. Instead of painstakingly configuring threat indicators and mapping out specific scenarios by hand, users can simply design a core set of indicators and let the algorithm construct and score all the possible permutations.

Automatically generating behavioral risk scores and prioritizing alerts accordingly improves risk coverage and reduces the amount of time spent on alert configuration and maintenance. It eliminates the need for manual risk score assignment and empowers analysts to make quick, informed decisions.

The experience and professionalism of those analysts matters. You’ve equipped them with modern tools, but it takes human insight to use those tools correctly.

The value of detection and response expertise

Cyberattacks don’t always follow a strictly defined pattern. Every organization presents a unique risk profile, with a surface area defined by its network architecture, IT equipment, and even company culture. A broad variety of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) exist for navigating all these variables.

Investigating security incidents is a uniquely human challenge. The log records and other data you receive from your UEBA solution play a critical role in that investigation, but they can’t complete it on their own.

It takes a security professional to collect that data, analyze it, independently verify it, and orchestrate the appropriate response. The better qualified this person is, the faster and more accurate the investigation will be.

For example, consider an insider attack scenario. Your UEBA platform can alert you when a legitimate user upgrades their own permissions and starts interfering with files they’ve never touched before. But this information can’t tell you much about that individual’s intentions or motives, or whether they’re working alone or as part of a group. Someone needs to interpret the data before arriving at these conclusions.

This is where the value of a highly qualified managed detection and response (MDR) vendor truly shows itself. Experienced analysts spend time adjusting UEBA algorithms to meet the specific needs of the organization itself. They continuously improve their analytical models to meet the security needs of the day and communicate their insights with greater effectiveness using customized data visualization solutions.

Castra is a reputable managed service vendor that uses next-generation UEBA solutions like Exabeam to detect suspicious activities, conduct thorough investigations, and mitigate security threats. We have built more than one hundred custom visualizations, dashboards, and reports for Exabeam, and developed more than fifty unique rules and detection models to serve our customers’ needs. Entrust your organization’s detection and response needs to our capable team of qualified industry experts.

The Exabeam Fusion Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting revealed how a group of Exabeam Fusion SIEM customers achieved a composite ROI of 245% over three years, with a payback period of less than six months.

Read the report to learn:

• Four measurable areas where customers achieved ROI using Exabeam Fusion SIEM
• Why customers choose Exabeam Fusion SIEM
• How the Exabeam Next-gen SIEM can transform security operations