How to Spot Insider Threats Before They Wreak Havoc

Attackers are already inside, whether you know it or not. In fact, according to the Cyber Security Intelligence Index, insider threats represent 60 percent of all attacks. How quickly can you spot and block an employee or contractor who is misusing their privileges? What about an intruder using compromised credentials gleaned from a phishing attack? Or ransomware that’s steadily encrypting your valuable files? As the minutes tick by, your risk of a costly data breach skyrockets. How costly? Well, the Ponemon 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study pegs the average cost of a breach at a whopping $3.62 million. Insider threats represent 60 percent of all attacks. How quickly can you spot an insider abusing their privileges or an attacker using compromised credentials? There are many solutions on the market that claim to help. But most of them follow a simple rule-based approach that drowns you in a flood of (mostly false) alarms that you have no hope of investigating. For example, in an effort to spot brute-force attacks, they’ll alert you every time any user enters an incorrect password seven times in a row, even though most of those incidents are insufficiently caffeinated (or overly caffeinated) employees making typing errors or folks just back from vacation and unable to remember their credentials. To hone in on the true threats, a solution needs to take into account the broader context of a user’s normal behavior and the current sequence of actions, not just an isolated event. 3 Change Auditor Threat Detection Change Auditor Threat Detection is different. It uses machine learning and user and entity This ebook describes nine of the most important patterns of suspicious behavior that Change Auditor Threat Detection can alert you to: 1. Abnormal AD activity behavioral analytics (UEBA) to pluck out 2. Brute-force attack the activity truly indicative of a rogue user 3. Snooping user or compromised account from the vast sea of audit data. Then it shows you the most 4. Data exfiltration or destruction suspicious users and alerts so you can 5. Privilege elevation respond quickly and efficiently. Specifically, the solution establishes a baseline of each user’s normal behavior — their usual logon times, what folders and files they typically access, the types of changes they make to Active Directory (AD), and so on. Then it uses unsupervised machine learning, user behavior analytics, SMART correlation and an array 46 million Raw events 6. Scripted use of privileged account 443 Threat indicators 55 SMART alerts 42 Risky users 7. Abnormal system access 8. Malware 9. Lateral movement Figure 1. Change Auditor Threat Detection distills the vast sea of audit data down to a manageable number of SMART alerts and highlights the riskiest users in your environment. of predefined threat indicators to analyze subsequent user activity in real time and spot the true threats. For example, in one actual 7,000-user environment, over a 45-day period, the solution distilled 46 million raw events down into just 42 risky users (see Figure 1). 4 Change Auditor Threat Detection identifies suspicious activity indicative of rogue users or compromised accounts — without drowning you in a sea of alerts.
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