Software to fight hacking by employees

The rapid pace of technological progress is transforming the cybersecurity landscape. The next generation of cybersecurity analytics is enabling users to detect activity and behaviour that are likely to constitute a cyberattack.

“User and entity behavioural analytics became the emerging technologies in the cybersecurity world last year that can help to foil cyberattackers by discovering security anomalies,” said Alex Lim, senior director for Southeast Asia at Forcepoint, a US cybersecurity firm.

The Thailand 4.0 economic model and financial technology (fintech) as well as the burgeoning world of cloud computing have increased potential for cybersecurity spending growth here, he said.

Mr Lim said user behaviour analytics software combined the ability of big data analytics and artificial intelligent technologies to detect users’ activities and data allowing businesses more employee visibility to help prevent insider threat, which is one of the biggest cybersecurity threats nowadays apart from hackers.

The technology can help to identify suspicious employee behaviour, particularly employees dealing with sensitive and important data. For instance, he said suspected employees include those who download customer data, share sensitive data, or software developers who look at source code that is not relevant to their tasks.

Force-point conducted a study of 1,252 cybersecurity professionals worldwide to understand better the state of cybersecurity and how organisations view a -forward-focused strategy.

Up to 80% of respondents believe it is very or extremely important to understand the behaviour of people as they interact with IP and other data, 18% believe this is moderately important, while only 2% believe understanding behaviour is slightly or not at all important.

Mr Tan said insider data leakage and theft was a top cybersecurity threat to companies.

Forcepoint enjoyed triple digit sales growth in 2016, and expects the same solid growth pace in 2017, thanks to the government’s efforts to push the development of a digitally-driven economy.

Global user behaviour analytics for the cybersecurity market was estimated to be valued at US$300 million in 2016. Global market for data loss prevention software totalled $1.7 billion last year, Mr Tan said.