Summary
Netskope has recently released two exciting enhancements to our Advanced UEBA product. The enhancements are:
- Key Detection Scenarios, which provide a reason for the impact on a user’s confidence index (UCI) score
- User Confidence Alerts, which generate alerts for UCI scores that cross below a threshold
Together, these two new features streamline operationalization of Advanced UEBA by providing operators alerts when it identifies users exhibiting risky behavior and an at-a-glance summary of the risky activity observed for each user.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss both of these features and provide some insight into how they can be used to discover and address real threats to your organization.
Key Detection Scenarios for Actionable Alerts
Advanced UEBA contains a feature called the User Confidence Index (UCI), analyzing and correlating user activity to present a holistic view of which users present the most risk through a scoring system that goes from 0-1000.
While the users with the lowest UCI scores represent the highest risk to the organization, operators need to understand at-a-glance why a user is risky so that they can trigger appropriate investigation and remediation workflows. For that reason, we recently introduced the “Key Detection Scenario” label for each risky user.
The Key Detection Scenario provides the predominant reason for each user’s moderate or poor UCI. In order to determine the Key Detection Scenario, we look at the labels on the alerts and display the scenario that accounts for the biggest impact on the user’s UCI.
The example below shows a user has a UCI score of 399 out of 1000 (in the moderate risk range), and the Key Detection Scenario is “Insider threat – Data movement.” This means that the user is moving data from a corporate managed cloud app to an unmanaged cloud app or instance. The user may be exfiltrating sensitive data to a personal cloud storage app, and this is an incident that should be investigated further.
On the incidents page, you can also see the alerts that contributed to the user’s UCI score, and the detection scenario associated with each alert:
In addition to having a narrative around the current user’s score, we can click on the Key Detection Scenario value to pivot to the Policy page, which shows us which policies fall under this particular scenario, as shown below. Here we could take further action on any of the policies being used for this scenario that we deem appropriate, such as adjusting the severity or disabling them:
Key Detection Scenario Values
Key Detection Scenarios are meant to give actionable insights to operators. Since there are more than 100 different UEBA policies, we have a wide variety of possible scenarios that would require a very different response. For example, if the Key Detection Scenario associated with a user’s UCI score is “Compromised device – Ransomware,” then the team can examine the user’s devices for ransomware and address it. However, if the Key Detection Scenario was “Insider threat – Data movement,” then the response may entail looking at what applications the user was moving data to, and if they violated DLP policies.
Below are the different scenarios currently available when this article was written. You will notice that all of the scenarios fall into three main categories that UEBA uses, which are compromised credential, compromised device, and insider threat. The policies all fit into these categories, so every alert will have only one of these values