What is UEBA?

User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) is a new category of security solutions that utilizes analytics and machine learning to discover atypical and suspicious user or machine behavior on a network. Volta recommends implementing Exabeam’s industry-leading UEBA solution alongside a modern SIEM (Security Information Event Management).

What’s the difference between UEBA and SIEM?

UEBA is related to SIEM in that it performs similar functions like collecting network events, analyzing them and generating alerts, but UEBA specifically focuses on the analysis side. It can identify new and diverse types of attacks that are constantly being invented. It can also reveal incidents that hide in the noise. These include zero-day attacks, and even insider threats that may already exist on a network. In 2017, Gartner proposed that vendors integrate UEBA solutions with SIEM platforms. 

Acronym Breakdown
  • Users: To help identify security issues, you need to evaluate user behavior with respect to assets located across your network.
  • Entity: Gartner introduced this portion of the acronym in 2015. In addition to users, UEBA can also monitor entities such as routers, servers, enterprise applications or even IoT devices.
  • Behavior: The technology creates a behavioral baseline for each user and entity–that is, how they normally behave. Any baseline deviation could point to a security event. 
  • Analytics: UEBA ingests significantly large data volumes. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning then match it against historical behavior to call out anything resembling abnormal behavior. It can do this across thousands of users, entities and peer groups.

So how does Exabeam’s UEBA specifically help with Incident Response (IR)? In the past, analysts would have had to spend untold amounts of time sifting through large numbers of alerts and so-called “noise” to discover a real security incident. In finding one, they’d have to spend even more time to dig even further to understand what actually occurred. All that would have to take place before any remediation could begin. The UEBA automates most of this process. It identifies events having special security significance, and matches them with others that may be part of the same security incident. In this way, UEBA helps organizations perform IR more quickly and accurately, without wasting precious analyst hours.

Top 5 UEBA Use Cases
  • Identify insider access abuse or malicious insiders who are performing risky activities outside of their normal behavior. Also helps detect lateral movement of adversaries within the environment who have gained low-level employee credentials.
  • Detect threat activities across multiple vectors, such as servers and network devices, not just user accounts.
  • Incident prioritization by reducing false positives.
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Data Exfiltration Detection which alerts when proprietary data is being moved within the environment or transferred out of the environment. 
  • Executive Asset and IoT Entity Monitoring to automatically set up baseline behavior models for sensitive executive systems as well as an unlimited number of IoT devices to identify unusual usage.

A modern SIEM with native UEBA can equip security teams with powerfully defensive tools. Its incident detection doesn’t rely on predefined correlation rules or threat patterns. Rather, it automatically identifies abnormal and risky activity to provide meaningful alerts with far fewer false positives spanning users, IP addresses and IT systems. Exabeam’s UEBA stitches sessions together to create a complete timeline for each security incident, so that security teams are empowered to take immediate remediation steps. Talk to Volta about a modern SIEM and Exabeam UEBA today.