Threat to an IT Network from End User Activities

Background
A major goal of managing IT networks is to guard against security breaches. A hardware or software asset needs to be monitored on a regular basis, if possible continuously, so that appropriate preventive steps can be taken to keep the IT infrastructure running well as well as secured, because an organization’s success and reputation depends on its IT systems being protected. Though security threats may come from improper management of hardware and software assets, it is quite likely to be caused by end-user actions as well, such as unmonitored user activities.

What is meant by ‘Monitoring User Activity’
What does it mean to monitor “user activity”? It means checking for uncommon, unexpected, suspicious actions by users, including use of (specific) computers, network shares, applications, services, data etc. within the network. Being able to quickly identify any system misuse is an effective security mechanism, which might enable to stop an attack, and clean up any fallout.

In an IT environment users take many actions as part of day-to-day activities, such as run various applications, collect / create / process data, install & uninstall software, request to upgrade hardware & software etc. As part of managing the network, IT Administrators deploy new versions / patches of Operating Systems and applications, add and/or replace components / peripherals. The combination of existing software in the network and certain user actions might unknowingly open the door for security problems, such as attempt to hack the computers, copy / alter / delete data, download virus / malware etc. Sometimes these problems are inadvertent, but deliberate actions to compromise network security is possible, and are not uncommon. Effect of any such security breach can be devastating for an organization – ask the dozens of high-profile companies in the news for the wrong reasons over past couple of years! A potential problem indication can be as simple as a particular user logging into / trying to log into a computer (server / desktop) that is not expected or at an odd hour (beyond normal office hours), or a USB drive being plugged into a computer and such. At times it could be a genuine requirement, in which case the red-flag can be reviewed and discarded. In the other cases, that’s the main clue to track down and fix the problem. Being aware is essential to protect anything, or at least to assess and address any damage.

Challenges of monitoring user activity
Manual tracking of these events are hard to start with, and it gets increasing complex and time consuming. What is needed is an automated process that tracks users’ activities in detail as required. Every organization’s network has its own requirements, priorities, challenges. Accordingly, the relevant events can be setup to be monitored and alerts can be raised for review by the IT administrator.

But how to monitor effectively?
Finding the proverbial needle of security-threat in the haystack of activities is challenging. Automation is a viable way of identifying potential issues and narrowing down the list to actionable items. It’s not just the power of recording all possible actions & events in the network and analyzing those, the flexibility and ease of fitting the tool into an organization’s own requirement is just as important.

This variety of reports on end-user activities provide a good idea as to what is happening in the network related to the end-users. You can get a report as a whole as well as use ad-hoc queries regarding specific users or particular activities.