Extract from Liji Kuruvilla’s article “The Human Factor of Cyber Resilience: The call is coming from inside the house”
In today’s increasingly interconnected digital landscape, the call may indeed be coming from inside the house. Internal threats, such as credential compromise, privileged account abuse, and malicious insiders, pose significant risks to cyber resilience. The key to mitigating these risks lies in identifying and monitoring high-risk end-user behavior without adopting a “big brother” approach. The complexity of managing user behavior across a vast data estate, including various workloads and applications, demands sophisticated solutions. Veritas’ User Behavior Analytics (UBA) within Alta Data Protection and NetBackup 10.4 offers proactive self-defense capabilities. These tools enable organizations to detect, mitigate, and respond to threats, ensuring that critical backups remain secure and recoverable.
In Phase Two of the Veritas Cyber Recovery Checklist, organizations are urged to “Identify and monitor high-risk end-user behavior.” This doesn’t mean you need to adopt an intrusive “big brother” approach, scrutinizing every move your team makes. Let’s be honest, you have more pressing priorities than tracking every click. However, you still need to be aware if something suspicious is happening so you can take action and safeguard your data proactively.
According to Securonix 2024 Insider Threat Report, “the number of organizations reporting insider attacks increased…to 76%.” Credential compromise, privileged account abuse, and malicious insiders represent a significant threat to cyber resilience, so it is important to monitor for changes in user behavior. This might sound simple, but when you look across your entire data estate, you will have users with varying levels of credentials across dozens, if not hundreds, of enterprise workloads, databases, PaaS or SaaS applications. Analyzing a single user’s activity across the enterprise is complex. Identifying their normal behavior and spotting any irregularities becomes daunting, especially when you need to scale this process for all users across the entire organization.
