Insider Risk Management: Elevating Network Security to a New Level

The following is a guest blog post from Quadrant Knowledge Solutions analyst Aiyaz Ahmed Shaik and Quadrant VP and principal analyst Divya Baranawal.

Insider threats continue to be a thorn in the side of companies in all business verticals, including financial services. Factors such as the rise in distributed and remote teams, increasingly sophisticated intrusion tactics (spear phishing), the inherent complexity involved in modern data storage (multi-cloud and hybrid environments), as well as the increased use of sensitive data posing complex and ever-evolving challenges for the security teams, have made these threats harder to detect and defend against. Modern Insider ThreatManagement (ITM) solutions help organizations combat this threat effectively. Hence, these tools have become indispensable for organizations. In this blog, we will delve into one such solution: Bottomline's ITM solution and how it elevates organizational network security to a whole new level.

Intricacies of Insider Threat Management Market:

Insider Threat Management has assumed a crucial role in sensitive organizational data protection strategies, owing in large part to remote work arrangements where a plethora of devices, both secured and unsecured, and users require access to organizational assets. ITM solutions have also evolved to seamlessly integrate with cloud services, exerting control over access to cloud-based resources. Furthermore, Insider Threat Management has emerged as a pivotal element in the execution of network security strategies, enabling organizations to isolate critical assets and prevent unauthorized access in the event of a security breach.

The insider threat management (ITM) market is rapidly evolving, driven by the above-mentioned need to balance privacy with effective security. We expect to see the convergence of ITM platforms with DLP solutions and the leveraging of AI for automatic screen mapping and self-tuning analytics to ensure holistic data protection. Monitoring all web applications, including SaaS, will be crucial. Incident response beyond endpoints will be streamlined by automated workflows powered by SIEM, UEBA, IAM, and PAM (I don’t know what these are and should be detailed). Mobile devices, the Internet of Things, and cloud environments will also be closely monitored by ITM, with machine learning and threat intelligence ensuring constant adaptation to new threats. Modern Insider Threat Management solutions provide more integrated and automated solutions that safeguard valuable data and assets.

Along with integration and automation, most vendors in the Insider Threat Management (ITM) market are offering a suite of capabilities to fortify internal organizational security. The capabilities include meticulous user and device monitoring, advanced threat detection, analytical reporting on dashboards, automated alerts, rapid response, and thorough investigation of cases to further enhance the solution’s effectiveness. The solution can also incorporate User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to discern patterns and anomalies within user activities. Additionally, ITM stands out with differentiators such as sentiment analysis, identity proofing, threat intelligence integration, entity profiling, and a versatile poly-cloud/multi-cloud offering, ensuring a nuanced and robust approach to safeguarding valuable data across diverse environments.

About Record & Replay v6 

Bottomline's Insider Threat Management solution, titled Record & Replay v6, minimizes risk by detecting anomalous user behavior and high-risk transactions in real-time. The solution supports on-premises, hybrid, and cloud deployment and allows monitoring of real-time user activity. Its behavioral monitoring capability helps detect attackers and high-risk insider activity. The solution also utilizes machine learning to help identify irregularities, eliminate false positives, and collect data from all channels for analysis, reporting, and investigations.

The Bottomline solution also helps Record & Replay user access to corporate systems by capturing all user activity across legacy and modern applications located on-premises and in the cloud in the organizational IT system. This is done by utilizing patented technology that is based on non-invasive data sniffing without deploying any agents, to ensure employee data privacy The solution’s alert and case management capability enables cases and alerts to be visible on dashboards with a flexible reporting engine and pre-defined reports and helps in simplifying alert management. Additionally, it provides extensive information such as employee/account/customer profiles, anomalies, as well as visual replays of the recorded user session in which the suspicious insider risk activities were performed.

Bottomline Record & Replay enables Profiling and Anomaly Detection capability, providing detailed insights on internal fraud or data leakage by monitoring employee data. It also provides a set of 100+ preconfigured internal fraud scenarios through the out-of-the-box rules feature for implementing automated response actions to any sort of data breach. Bottomline Record & Replay leverages the screen recording feature, extracts data out of the screens, and feeds it to the analytic engine to enable advanced threat detection.

Making a robust solution

Bottomline Record & Replay utilizes cross-platform monitoring to identify and detect fraud and data theft activities. In addition, the solution is equipped with an analytics engine to provide statistical profiling of users and peer groups and alert correlation. It also includes predictive risk scoring and the ability to visually replay all user activity and a key layer of security with extensive fraud analytics and behavioral tracking.

This solution empowers organizations to instill accountability in authorized users, help move from transaction tracking to human behavior tracking, and enhance organizational security. These tasks are mainly performed by providing centralized visibility into user behavior across applications as well as discovering, analyzing, and documenting suspicious behavior using Record and Replay.

New Product Enhancements done by Bottomline for Record and Replay:

SaaS application monitoring helps expand the monitored threat surface to modern applications such as Salesforce.

Monitoring of web applications using strong encryption has become possible. As security standards progress, stronger encryption (TLS 1.3) becomes almost a standard. The recording function, which was based on network sniffing, had a limitation in decrypting strong encryption.

The search of lists within recorded sessions will support search globally if any item of a list is found on any screens complementing multiple use cases such as protection against external fraudulent accounts, internal compromised accounts, and stopping leakage of employee account numbers, employee customer IDs, and dormant accounts.

Automatic screen mapping will enable extracting a full audit trail of user access to sensitive and sending it to analytics or data lakes.

The Big Picture: Why Record & Replay for Insider Risk Management

The ever-evolving nature of insider threats necessitates the deployment of advanced solutions. Bottomline's Record & Replay v6 emerges as a robust tool owing to recent and planned enhancements such as SaaS application monitoring, automatic screen mapping, monitoring of web applications using strong encryption and search of lists within recorded sessions. These enhancements help users to fortify themselves against internal risks and data breaches. The tool deploys a strategic blend of monitoring, behavior analysis, and analytics to combat insider threats effectively which users can leverage to ensure optimum protection.