Digital business transformation requires a fast-moving, collaborative culture. As companies on this fast track focus on innovation and speed to market, they inherently introduce more risk from the inside. Furthermore, in 2020, remote work became the norm, requiring increased adoption of cloud collaboration technologies. This shift caused a sudden acceleration of insider risk like we’ve never seen before.

Network hardware failures. Internet outages. DDoS attacks. These are the types of disruptions you probably spend your time preparing to handle. But there’s another potential source of trouble that most IT pros think about much less frequently, and which happens far more often: employee offboarding. Whether an employee is leaving to pursue another opportunity or an employee is being terminated, you need to make sure your company’s network and data are secure.

ManageEngine brought home its first set of accolades for 2020: two InfoSec Awards presented by Cyber Defense Magazine at RSA Conference 2020. Amidst the over 3,000 cyberdefense innovators that were assessed by Cyber Defense Magazine for its 2020 InfoSec Awards, ManageEngine was recognized for its identity and access management (IAM) offering, AD360, and for its insider threat prevention in Log360.

Among the different types of cyberattacks, insider threats are the hardest to track and have the highest rate of success. This can be attributed to their use, or rather misuse, of legitimate credentials, machines, and access privileges. Traditional SIEM solutions use simple rule-based alerting to detect potential insider threats, which cannot analyze user behavior or detect any anomalies therein.

As discussed in our blog post [What is User Activity Monitoring?], user activity monitoring (UAM) is a form of surveillance that provides visibility and insight into employee productivity and engagement while also revealing insider security threats. While UAM on company-owned or company-sanctioned devices and networks is legal, ethical and HR considerations require that UAM be implemented with a high level of professionalism and sensitivity.

User Activity Monitoring (UAM) tracks the behavior of internal end-users—employees, subcontractors, partners, and so on—on a company’s networks, devices, and other IT resources. UAM, sometimes also called employee monitoring, may be deployed for a number of reasons, such as providing insight into the productivity of both individual employees and the company as a whole. Is Employee X spending too much time browsing the internet for non-business purposes during work time?

If you thought masked hackers in dark rooms spreading malware were your only security concern, think again. In its Insider Threat Report for 2018, Crowd Research Partners brought to light that almost 90 percent of organizations find themselves vulnerable to insider threats. What’s worse is that 50 percent of these organizations experienced an insider attack in 2018.