How valuable is user session visibility?
How valuable is user session visibility? If you are a security officer, you might already know the answer. Given the applications used within your enterprise, securing them is one thing; knowing what happened is quite another. As vast enterprises focus on cloud-based applications and user access, security officers require the necessary tools to empower their infrastructure with appropriate defense and strategies to secure vital resources and access points.
The lack of visibility into live user sessions can cause uncertainty and high-risk cases. Devastating breaches or attacks can occur anytime, and identifying positives to false positives can bring fatigue without the proper insight of what could have caused the incident. For such cases, authentication and authorization are standard, however, enterprises need to look further into the visibility of sessions and monitor actions taken by users.
Privileged accounts are often vulnerable to attacks and, in some cases, are the main threat actors within organizations. The 2021 Data Breach Investigation Reportby Verizon states that 80% of common privilege misuse is privilege abuse. Where major attack vectors are network-based access and access to resources. Privileged accounts have access to vital components which can be used or cause disruptions within your network.
In such instances, security teams need to go over all the evidence that they can get their hands on. Amongst the most common are log files where you have data about activities, patterns, operations, etc. Certain security members need to dig through these thousands of lines to find a possible clue or anomaly of what happened and how it happened. It is not uncommon for these security teams to have certain access limitations to these logs, as with multiple integrated IT systems, it can cause a headache due to analysis fatigue.
What is User Session Visibility?
Session Monitoring enables the recording of user access sessions and real-time connection supervision. A web-based session player allows administrative users to join a session and pause or terminate the connection. Moreover, a session stream can be shared, allowing other administrators, supervisors, or employees to see the recorded session and allow collaboration between users.
User session visibility enables proactive monitoring through configurable policies. Upon detection of specific expressions, it can automatically send email notifications to pause or terminate the connection and even block the user, disconnecting them from the active session to IT infrastructures.
Benefits Of User Session Visibility
To gain more oversight and details into users that are connected to sensitive applications or servers, user visibility is key to bolstering and increasing the benefits of supervised activity.
Identification: acting as a source to help identify incidents in a quicker manner
Comprehensive Auditing: Enable a more creative and comprehensive approach to gather reports to auditors with video playback.
Compliance Mandates: Meet compliance mandates with encrypted and secure remote connections and holistic auditing ability
Incident Response: increase your reaction to incidents with powerful AI tools and admin supervision.
CTOs, need to begin asking the right questions to improve their procedures and approach towards finding the appropriate solution for web security and privileged or vulnerable user accounts:
– Can you provide a record of specific user activity?
– Can you confirm the identity of the user who initiated a session? How do you know that the user is behind the screen?
– If not, how long does it take you to review log data in cases of suspicious behavior and confirm user identity?
– Can you verify the user’s identity and access in a centralized system?
Understanding these modern needs and practices can provide enterprises with the right approach and leverage against modern threats. Security decision-makers need to feel confident in the systems and tools they use, which can reduce the limited visibility and control over their resources and confidential data. As identity is a new parameter with cybersecurity, frameworks such as Zero Trust are crucial for CTOs. Access to tools such as user session visibility is key to bringing forth a defensive and robust cyber strategy.
To learn more about session monitoring and how it can help your organization meet compliance mandates and provide administrative oversight, get in touch with us.
Author: Damian Borkowski– Technical Marketing Specialist
