Tracking behaviour to protect entities

All sectors will depend on high levels of connectivity, from education to manufacturing to financial management. With every action being digitised, the potential for cyber threats grows

Enterprises and organisations are at constant war against cyber threats. The potential data breach points in the employees’, vendors’ and clients’ ecosystem have exploded. This has made the earlier systems of information and data security redundant.
 
User behaviour analytics (UBA) is helping companies tackle the challenges of data breach and fraud detection with far greater efficiency, scale, and speed.
 
In its simplest form a UBA system tracks the normal activities of individuals and creates a basic benchmark over a certain period. Once the benchmark and baseline are established, the same systems keeps a constant track for variations.
 

For instance, the tax department can send an alert if an abnormal amount of funds are received in a bank account. Similarly, the system can track the activities of connected devices and machines to flag unusual activities. Even for this, certain variance in normal behaviour is ignored. But beyond a certain level of abnormality, the UBA system will sound instant alerts. In many ways, the onus of security has shifted significantly to individuals from institutions.

 
According to an IndustryARC research report, the demand for UBA systems is growing rapidly across the world. The market for UBA is forecast to reach $4.9 billion by 2025, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 41.5 per cent from 2020 to 2025. “User and Entity Behavior Analytics is a mechanism for detecting insider risks, financial fraud and targeted attacks. This approach is used to analyse human behaviour patterns, and then use statistical analysis and algorithms to identify variances,” the report says. “It is emerging as the most promising response to comprehensive cyber threats and fraud.”

 
The IndustryARC report says that UBA uses advanced analysis, aggregates log and report data, and analyses packets, flows, files and other types of information, as well as other types of threat data, to assess if certain forms of activity and actions are likely to constitute a Cyber Attack.
 
According to a report by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) of the United States government, “a hyperconnected world could support up to 1 million devices per square kilometer with next generation cell phone systems (5G), compared with the 60,000 devices currently possible with current cell networks, with even faster networks on the horizon.”

 
The Global Trends 2040 Report by DNI also recognises that cyber threats cross borders, and “cyber security enforcement based on geographic borders is likely to become less relevant in an increasingly global web.”
 
The only answer to such a scale of cyber security enforcement is to use increasingly smarter tools. Manual efforts to set rules for security breaches is obsolete already. Smart systems which can anticipate, identify, and nullify attacks are the only recourse to protecting information as connectivity between devices explodes.
 
The new waves of the Covid-19 virus infection means that digitisation of functions will continue to accelerate. Not just private enterprises, nearly every sector will depend on high levels of connectivity for functioning, from education to manufacturing to financial management. With every action being digitised and with every new device being added, the potential for cyber threats grows. Government services, benefit transfers and procurement have become digital.

 
The process of vaccination will create important personal and national data for nearly every person in the world.
 
Government bodies will have to deploy UBA systems in their organisations too. Typically, government bodies are a few steps behind in security systems. National, regional and hyper local government machinery are particularly vulnerable to information breach. The same way that enterprises are tracking user behaviour of their employees, government bodies will have to enhance their systems to monitor their representatives. The cyber security wars will only escalate.