End-user Trust: The Bullseye of Modern IT Security

The Zero Trust IT security approach is gaining popularity, globally. The reason behind this IT security philosophy becoming mainstream is that it demands continuous assessment of the ‘trust’. Yes, it is the ‘trust’ that is conferred upon end-users, privileged users, administrators to access systems, is the weakest link in the attack kill-chain. Steered away by greed, vengeance, or some other malicious intent-like spying, end-users often tend to do things that aren’t supposed to be done. They misuse this ‘trust’. As a result, organizations suffer data breaches, applications misuse/abuse, and data exfiltration. On many occasions, there is a loss of productivity as some end-users tend to drift away from configured base-line policies. 

So, how can this ‘trust’ be continuously evaluated? That is a big question. But not difficult to answer! Yes, indeed, if organizations can continuously assess trust by monitoring behaviour patterns and doing analytics around it, IT security and risk management staff can significantly reduce the IT attack surface. In other words, monitoring end-user ‘trust’ is the bullseye of modern IT security. At ARCON we believe that ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) will become a central security component in implementing the Zero Trust philosophy. 

More on misused ‘trust’, critical information and continuous assessment of ‘trust’

Remember the eye-opening incident from South-east Asia, where highly confidential information from the Ministry of Health was compromised by one of their ex-employees stealthily? Even the personal records of the Prime Minister were not spared. This incident showed us how much organizations can suffer if ‘trust’ is misused. Employees can exploit trust, especially those who have privileged rights to access confidential databases, business-critical applications and systems to any extent, anywhere and anytime to bury organizations’ reputation beyond recovery. Hence, trust should be assessed continuously to ensure reliability of every single task of an end-user.

Why Trust should be assessed?

As digitalization is expanding rapidly in every industry, organizations are finding it challenging to manage and monitor the rising number of end-users and their activities associated with multiple layers of applications. As a result, the risk surface expands when risky behaviour patterns go undetected. Subsequently, the global IT security community today relies more on risk-predictive security approaches, moving away from identifying and mitigating threat approaches. 

Stay tuned to get the latest updates on ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics solution. The tool is now available with enhanced features. Shortly we will share our UBA brochure that will discuss all the features.

Some of the highlights are discussed below:

ARCON | UBA 

• Configures and identifies user behaviour based on their roles and daily activities
• Seamlessly monitors every end-user behaviour even in granular level of IT infrastructure
• Uses ML algorithms to determine user authenticity and raise suspicion alarm to the administrators during any kind of discrepancy 
• Manages application inventory and their access criteria in a huge IT setup
• Automatically creates and assigns group of end-users based on their roles and responsibilities in a shared environment
• Provides detailed report of every minute details of the tasks performed by a particular user on a given date and time
• Has User-friendly UI for the dashboard that makes the administrators’ jobs easier
• Assigns, elevates, expands and revokes admin rights based on requirement and ensures a well-managed and well-controlled IT environment
• Assigns privileged rights to an end-user on interim basis to perform any urgent task with a pre-defined time frame and in the process supports Just-In-Time elevation
• Authenticates  end-users by facial recognition
• Analyzes end-users with their login attempts by provisioning role-based access
• Helps IT security team with overall productivity report of an end-user

The Bottom-line

Deploying ARCON | UBA tool mitigates IT risks arising from risky behavioural and anomalous end-user profiles. Both as a standalone and add-on solution, this tool helps the IT security team to provide additional visibility to predict risks arising from malicious end-users.