How SIEM Solutions Help Mitigate Insider Threats

How does SIEM mitigate insider threats? How do insider threats threaten your enterprise and its data? What can you do to prevent insider threats in the first place?

Insider threats refer to hacks and cyberattacks that come from within your own workforce and employees rather than an external attacker. Often, these insider threats stem from simple negligence; employees don’t realize they violate cybersecurity best practices and thus make critical mistakes. Sometimes, this results in misconfigured databases allowing open access to anyone who can find it. Other times, employees send off a sensitive email to the wrong person.

However, insider threats can also start in a place of malice. Employees let go under adverse circumstances may seek digital revenge. Alternatively, employees might seek to steal finances from your company to supplement their bank accounts; they could also steal data to sell them to the black market.    

Unfortunately, insider threats can prove even more difficult to detect or predict than external threat actors. After all, you cannot rely on typical threat intelligence to help you prepare against these attacks; insider threats rarely follow the same patterns. 

Instead, insider threats use the access they already possess to steal data or otherwise disrupt your workflows and processes. How can your business mitigate insider threats with SIEM?

How SIEM Mitigates Insider Threats

The key to mitigating insider threats with SIEM stems from user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). UEBA works by cataloging the behaviors of all your users, both human and non-human. From there, it establishes baselines for each user; afterward, users’ behaviors are compared to that baseline. 

As a result, if a user starts to deviate from that baseline, it can trigger an alert so your security team can investigate. Your solution might ask for more authentication factors to ensure that a hacker didn’t compromise the account. Otherwise, they may limit the account’s access or subject it to closer monitoring to watch for a potential attack. 

Thus SIEM can mitigate insider threats just as soon as they begin. 

You can learn more about this our SIEM Buyer’s Guide. We cover the top providers in detail as well as the top capabilities. 

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