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Modern day organizations face recurrent risks from cyber space. Information systems, as witnessed during the recent wave of advanced ransomware attacks, can be thrown out of gear, if the underlying security is not up to the mark.
To counter this enormous challenge, organizations have been investing abundantly to strengthen Network Security. However, data loss and cyber frauds cannot be prevented if the inner realm of organization is inadequately protected.
The $81 million sensational cyber heist at the Central Bank of Bangladesh in 2016 showed how advanced are cyber criminals. In that incident, cyber frauds infected the computer systems by planting malware, which cloned legitimate transactions, resulting in 35 fake international money transfers.
However, experts, including investigators from the Federal Reserve, did not rule out that such fraud of gigantic proportion could have been possible without insiders’ help. More worryingly, advanced hackers can also break into systems by tricking unsuspecting employees to click malicious links. The incident brings a very crucial security concern to the forefront: critical data and other forms of sensitive information is extremely vulnerable to misuse if systems security and operation teams fail to monitor end-user activities.
While organizations are perfecting peripheral security to protect theft of sensitive data, still, unsuspectingly, these businesses are compromising huge chunks of data due to frauds perpetrated by insiders. In a survey conducted in 2015, Kroll, a business advisory firm, reported that 75% of the surveyed companies experienced fraud within a year and 81% of these frauds were perpetrated by insiders.
Corporate insiders are amongst the most dominant cyber threats. To detect malicious activities however is a huge challenge. Forensic Investigations cannot always reach the root-cause of any incident. In fact it is absolutely impractical to monitor hundreds or even thousands of end-users in a typical IT setup. Against this backdrop, it is essential for organizations to have a security framework, wherein anything unusual or fraudulent activity is reported and blocked in a real time.
To accommodate this necessity, Information Security staff needs a mechanism to be in place that would allow to identify end-user behavior activities vis-Ã -vis configured baseline activities. Today, it is extremely business imperative to predict risks. Accordingly, organizations need to seriously consider deploying User Behavior Analytics, which is an automated tool capable to monitor, record, and assess all end user behavior profiles including block activities that deviate from base-line activities in a real-time.
The Bottom line:
In the increasingly digital age, it is difficult if not virtually impossible to predict advanced targeted attacks; however, predicting threats within organizations is surely an easier task if organizations can reinforce internal security and compliance controls using automated tool such as User Behavior Analytics.
ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.
