How User And Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) Can Help Fight Insider Threats

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

In approximately 90 percent of data loss prevention incidents, the cause is legitimate users who innocently send out data for business purposes, according to new statistics surrounding insider threats released by Bay Dynamics. These individuals exhibit normal employee behavior in the office, even though it might violate established company business policies. The majority of the other approximately 10 percent of incidents involve users who are deliberately taking shortcuts and are exhibiting signs of being repeat offenders, putting their employers at risk.

The statistics come from Bay Dynamics’ user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) platform that monitors, analyzes, and builds profiles on more than a million users across enterprises nationwide. UEBA, which analyzes behaviors and flags anomalies that may signal a security risk, is explained in a Bay Dynamics blog post by co-founder and CTO Ryan Stolte.

Bay Dynamics study revealed nearly 1 percent of data loss prevention incidents are critical ones carried out by a malicious or compromised insider. Nearly 80 percent of users who are exhibiting behaviors such as visiting high-risk websites will make changes to become more security-conscious when called out directly by their employers. One of the issues identified by Bay Dynamics is that as much as 20 percent of the users are uneducated when it comes to security, and thus they put their organizations at risk of a breach due to ignorance.

UEBA is now helping thousands of businesses nationwide thwart destructive cyberattacks, as Stolte explained. Industry analyst firm Gartner expects the UEBA market revenue to reach almost $200 million by the end of 2017, up from less than $50 million today, and Bay Dynamics, experienced a 100 percent increase in revenue and customer acquisition in UEBA and the predictive analytics space in 2014.