UEBA Superpowers: Enhance Security Visibility with Rich Insights to Take Rapid Action Against Threats

As the cybersecurity landscape continually evolves, SOCs must quickly identify, evaluate, and counteract cyberattacks. In the heat of a security investigation or incident response, achieving rapid visibility and rich contextual insights about the attack are not merely advantageous, but essential. 

To achieve this is easier said than done. Your organization's digital ecosystem is overflowing with data — every login, every access request, every anomaly. Within this data lies the key to understanding and mitigating potential security threats. You have to quickly make sense of this data in order to uncover stealthy hidden threats amidst the noise. You have to understand the who, why, where, and what of those threats before you can confidently take action. Existing security tools are not providing the depth and breadth of insight into stealthy, unknown, and insider threats, leaving teams blind and unsure how to respond. Without a sufficient level of situational awareness or contextual understanding of these attacks and threats, security teams are at a massive disadvantage — unable to act rapidly and decisively.  

Splunk User Behavior Analytics (UBA) helps security teams navigate this complex environment. Splunk UBA illuminates the hidden corners of this ecosystem, providing unparalleled visibility into the behaviors and patterns that define the network's pulse.

Crafting a Visual Narrative from Data: The Power of Contextual Insights

Splunk UBA's strength is its capacity to incorporate disparate data points into a coherent narrative. It does this by utilizing over 250 advanced machine learning rules and models to meticulously process behavioral data and pinpoint anomalies with a precision that traditional security measures cannot match. But it's not just about detecting anomalies; it's about understanding them within the broader context of the operational environment. Splunk UBA identifies deviations that signify potential threats by establishing behavior baselines and employing dynamic peer group analysis. This approach ensures that the detection of unusual behavior is not only accurate but deeply contextualized, providing a clear understanding of what constitutes normal operations and what signals a security threat.

Splunk UBA visualizes threats across multiple phases of an attack to give security analysts a comprehensive understanding of attack root cause, scope, severity, and timelines. 

This context-rich view enables analysts to rapidly assess impact, and make informed decisions quickly and confidently. Splunk UBA synthesizes related anomalies into a unified threat narrative, shifting from mere alerts to telling a comprehensive story. This correlation enables security teams to focus on genuine threats with all the context they need to respond effectively. 

Visibility across users, entities and tools? No problem. Splunk UBA analyzes and monitors users, entities and tools to help SOCs understand user and threat behaviors. Splunk UBA analyzes data from multiple sources, including databases like active directory; your typical security tools like antivirus, EDR and EPP (endpoint detection and response or endpoint protection platforms), intrusion prevention systems (IPS/NGIPS), and of course, SIEM; and network security tools like routers, firewalls, identity access, and VPN; and threat intelligence feeds. 

Once Splunk UBA sees it, it shows it. Splunk UBA provides analysts with over 20 different dashboards that offer hundreds of custom permutations to view data and threat information. This visibility allows analysts to quickly form opinions on threat events. These dashboards include the Main Dashboard, Threats Table, Threat Details, Anomaly Details, Anomalies Table, Anomaly Risk Summary, Threat Anomalies Timeline, User Facts, Peer Group Analysis, tables for Users/Devices/Apps, Analytics Dashboards, Data Sources Dashboard, and User Feedback Learning. Furthermore, Graph and Kill Chain Analysis Dashboards provide deep investigative capabilities on any user, entity, anomaly or threat for faster insights.

Prioritizing Threats Intelligently

With its advanced threat modeling and scoring, Splunk UBA ensures that security teams can quickly identify and prioritize the most severe threats. This intelligent prioritization is crucial in a landscape where resources are finite, and the ramifications of overlooking a genuine threat can be significant. In the broader context of cybersecurity, where the digital and physical domains intersect, the potential for significant financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties underscores the necessity of a robust defense posture. The SEC's new requirements for cybersecurity incident disclosure — and the evolving expectations of stakeholders — amplify the need for precise threat identification and action. By distilling complex data into actionable insights, Splunk UBA arms organizations with the capability to address critical threats efficiently, safeguarding their operations, customer trust, and market position in an ever-competitive and regulated environment. By funneling billions of events down to the most critical alerts, Splunk UBA drastically reduces the time and effort required for threat review. This streamlined process is underpinned by a sophisticated blend of machine learning algorithms and statistical analysis, enhancing the efficiency of threat investigation and response.

As organizations navigate the complexities of the digital age, the need for tools like Splunk UBA has never been more evident. By enhancing visibility, providing rich contextual insights, and transforming data into decisive action, Splunk UBA empowers security teams to see and stop the most stealthy threats.

To learn more about how Splunk UBA can help you detect, investigate and respond to threats with unprecedented speed and clarity, explore our webpage, take a tour, and dive deeper into Splunk UBA's capabilities.

To read the first blog in this series, click here.