What does UEBA stand for (with a 5 minute introduction to UEBA)
What does UEBA stand for
UEBAis an acronym for User and Entity Behavior Analytics, a field of cybersecurity tools that analyze user behavior and apply advanced analytics to detect anomalous behavior. Let me explain this acronym word by word.
| User | UEBA technology helps you understand user behavior and identify security issues in networks, applications and other IT systems. |
| Entity | The 'E' in UEBA was introduced by Gartner in 2015. UEBA technology can also monitor non-user entities such as routers, servers, enterprise applications and even IoT devices. |
| Behavior | What does UEBA do with users and entities? Create a baseline of behavior that defines how users and entities "normally" behave. It then identifies anomalies that deviate from that norm. This has security implications. |
| Analytics | The analytics part of UEBA is based on AI and machine learning algorithms. UEBA ingests massive amounts of data and loads it into a machine learning model. The model learns past behavior across thousands of users, entities, and peer groups to understand what constitutes anomalous behavior. |
Brief Orientation: UEBA, and Related Security Trends
What is UEBA
UEBA stands for “User and Entity Behavior Analytics,” which uses machine learning and deep learning to learn the normal behavior of users and other entities on your internal network, and detect anomalous behavior. A new class of security solution that detects and infers whether the behavior has a security impact.
Unlike traditional security tools that rely on correlation rules and known attack patterns, UEBA can identify new types of attacks and incidents in the noise. This includes zero-day attacks and insider threats.
What does UBA stand for
Now that we've explained what UEBA stands for, let's define UBA. UBA stands for User Behavior Analytics, similar to UEBA but without the "E".
What is UBA
UBA (User Behavior Analytics) is the former name of the UEBA category coined by Gartner in 2014. Previously, UBA tools analyzed the behavior of individual users or groups of users only.
In 2015, Gartner revised the definition to include an "E" and renamed the category UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics). Under this broader definition, UEBA tools are capable of analyzing baseline behavior and detecting anomalies in entities other than users on the network, such as routers, servers, endpoints, and applications.
What is the difference between UEBA and UBA?
UBA focuses on the behavior of individual users, but UEBA can also analyze new and diverse entities operating on corporate networks. In addition to existing internal fraud, it also protects against external threats.
What is the difference between UEBA and SIEM?
A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system is a critical infrastructure of a Security Operations Center (SOC). SIEMs work with many enterprise systems and other security tools to collect all security logs and events across the enterprise, analyze these events, and generate alerts for your security team.
UEBA is closely related to SIEM. Because they have many features in common. Both collect events from the corporate network, analyze them and generate alerts. But while UEBA solutions focus on the analytics side, SIEM systems are good at handling a much broader set of security data and organizing it for security analysts. This allows the SOC to process systematically.
What is next-generation SIEM (equipped with UEBA)?
In 2017,Gartnersuggested that the SIEM platform should incorporate some advanced features. One of them is UEBA. Specifically, Gartner called on vendors to incorporate the UEBA solution into their SIEM platform and offer it as a set. Gartner does not directly refer to a "next-generation SIEM," but the company's documentation states:Next-generation SIEMIt provides an overview of the features that should be included in the . One of the vendors who followed the call wasExabeamis. This is a next-generation SIEM with UEBA capabilities and security automation capabilities.
How UEBA can help with incident response
UEBA is a key element in modern incident response. In the past, security analysts sifted through a flood of alerts to find a “real” security incident, then looked at additional evidence to find out what happened.
UEBA automates much of this process. Specifically, it identifies events of particular security significance and groups related events that may have formed part of the same security incident. In this way, UEBA can help organizations perform faster and more accurate incident response while also saving valuable security analyst time.
A 5 minute introduction to UEBA
Components of the UEBA system
| analysis module | Ingest and analyze parsed event data to identify anomalies and prioritize security incidents. |
| central storage | Save raw data and analysis results here. |
| auto answer | UEBA solutions can be integrated with IT systems and security tools to provide automated responses to security incidents. This can also be done with a dedicated solution called SOAR(Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response). |
Top UEBA Use Cases
| malicious insider | UEBA solutions can identify malicious insiders, even actions that appear harmless to traditional security tools. To do this, we define a baseline of normal behavior for each user and detect when that behavior changes. |
| Compromised Insider | UEBA solutions can quickly detect harmful actions taken by an attacker with control of a privileged account, without the knowledge of the account owner. It can also detect lateral movement. This is the act of an attacker switching to another system or user account in order to penetrate an IT system more deeply. |
| Incident prioritization | UEBA can intelligently predict particularly unusual, suspicious or dangerous incidents. Go beyond correlation rules and attack patterns to identify previously unknown harmful activity. You can also add context about the asset's importance to your organization. For example, if your system stores extremely important data, consider even small deviations from your normal behavior to be important. |
| DLP (Data Loss Prevention) | UEBA captures, prioritizes, and consolidates alerts from DLP tools used by many large enterprises to understand which alerts represent truly anomalous behavior. This reduces alert fatigue and helps analysts quickly identify true data breaches. |
| Entity analytics (IoT) | IoT has become a major security challenge. Some organizations have thousands of IoT devices in the field, yet have limited visibility into their behavior. Also, the security features are primitive. UEBA tracks an unlimited number of connected devices and defines behavioral criteria to detect abnormal or malicious behavior, such as connections from unusual sources, behavior at unusual times, or use of unusual device features. certain behaviors can be identified. |
Example of next-generation SIEM with UEBA embedded
An example of a modern SIEM solution that incorporates UEBA technology is Exabeam's Security Management Platform. Exabeam has the following UEBA features:
- Rule- and signature-agnostic incident detection: Exabeam identifies anomalous and risky behavior without pre-defined correlation rules or threat patterns, providing meaningful alerts with fewer false positives.
- Security Incident Timeline: Exabeam stitches together sessions to create a complete timeline of a single security incident across multiple users, IP addresses and IT systems.
- Peer Grouping: Exabeam dynamically groups similar entities such as users with the same role within an organization, analyzes normal behavior across groups, and detects anomalous behavior.
- Lateral Movement: Once an attacker has compromised a system, they move within the network, using different IP addresses and credentials to gain access to more and more systems. Exabeam combines data from multiple sources to reveal the path taken by attackers within your network.
Try the UEBA, SIEM and SOAR integrated platform with the demo version of Exabeam.
For more information on UEBA technology, see the UEBA chapter in our Essential Guide to SIEM.
ORION CASSETTO
Exabeam, Inc. Director, Product Marketing
video on demand
The threat is in full view! Realizing effective log analysis with machine learning
～What is Exabeam, the next-Next-Gen SIEM Platform Exabeam?～
As targeted attacks and internal fraud continue to increase in recent years, an increasing number of companies are building mechanisms (such as SIEM) to correlate and analyze logs from multiple security products in order to implement appropriate security operations. . This is because it is difficult to visualize the impact of each incident using only the logs of security products that have already been installed, and threats may be overlooked. However, building such a system requires security-related knowledge, analytical know-how, and ideas. In this seminar, we will introduce “Exabeam” which realizes log analysis by UEBA (User Entity Behavior Analytics) technology and efficiency of conventional SIEM operation.
Inquiry/Document request
In charge of Macnica Exabeam Co., Ltd.
- TEL：045-476-2010
- E-mail：exabeam-sales@macnica.co.jp
Mon-Fri 8:45-17:30
