Forcepoint UEBA: What's a better alternative?

User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA) security software is becoming increasingly popular as organizations struggle to protect their IT environments. The ever-evolving threat landscape demands advanced solutions to address the risks posed by malicious external entities and insiders. UEBA software leverages the power of behavioral analytics, automation, and machine learning to identify abnormal user and device behavior that may indicate malicious activity.

Many UEBA solutions are available on the market. In this guide, we'll take a look at Forcepoint’s UEBA offering and see what it provides customers and how it stacks up against the Reveal Platform by Next as a tool to enhance your cybersecurity posture.

In this article: 

• What is the Forcepoint UEBA solution?
• Features of Forcepoint behavioral analytics
• Advantages of Reveal as a UEBA and DLP solution
• Frequently asked questions

Wh‎at is the Forcepoint UEBA solution?

‎‎Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics incorporates diverse data sources from throughout the environment to derive insights regarding potentially risky user and entity behavior that may indicate a security threat.

The tool is designed to improve the productivity and efficiency of an organization’s security personnel by enabling them to proactively monitor for high-risk behavior. Awareness of emerging risks can be instrumental in thwarting them before they can damage business-critical systems and valuable data assets.

Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics provides organizations with these benefits:

• Comprehensive visibility covering structured and unstructured business data
• Deep analytical context that focuses on behaviors and not just anomalies
• Flexibility with customizable risk models to support multiple use cases
• Efficiency by enabling security teams to quickly pivot from alerts to investigations

Fe‎atures of Forcepoint behavioral analytics

‎Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics offers its customers an impressive set of features and capabilities designed to garner actionable insights from behavioral analytics. The analytics furnished by Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics are built upon four core principles that support a wide variety of customer use cases.

Diverse data sources for holistic visibility

One of the platform’s strong points is its ability to employ big data analytics on diverse data sources to offer comprehensive behavioral monitoring across the environment. Forcepoint users can map data from different sources for more effective analytics using a flexible data model and detailed informational model with a holistic view.

This feature enables organizations to easily integrate data from existing and future security solutions. Applicable data sources include HR applications, security information and event management (SIEM) tools, and data loss prevention (DLP) software. No downtime is required to make new data sources available to the tool’s analytical engines.

Hybrid analytics

Forcepoint’s solution incorporates rule-based and statistical methods to detect potentially risky behavior. This hybrid approach increases the tool’s effectiveness in identifying threats and risks of incidents such as intellectual property theft. 

The platform employs an analytical hierarchy made up of three types of elements:

• Features - These are bits of information from individual events that may indicate noteworthy or suspicious activity. Features may be related to data characteristics, behavioral patterns, or user-specific activities.
• Models - Features are used to define statistical and data-driven models used to describe entity activity over time.
• Scenarios - Multiple models may be combined that correspond to high-level use cases to address specific threats such as data exfiltration.

Configurability

All administrative users can contribute domain expertise to enhance artificial intelligence-powered analytics. Allowing application users and security analysts to add domain expertise about specific organizations, people, and data resources results in more insightful analytics. 

The platform also includes a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to create, configure, and fine-tune features, analytic models and scenarios for more precise threat protection.

Transparency

The tool provides simple and easy-to-understand analytics that produce insightful and accurate results. Analysts have access to enhanced details that allow them to better understand behavior through the user community. 

Investigations into suspicious behavior and potential insider threats are conducted using the intuitive entity timeline. This allows an analyst to take appropriate action, as necessary, to address threats.

Ad‎vantages of Reveal as a UEBA and DLP solution

‎Reveal’s UEBA functionality compares favorably with Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics. 

Reveal provides enhanced protection for the IT environment and promotes a more security-conscious organization in multiple ways. It combines the threat detection capabilities of a stand-alone UEBA platform with the information security of a data loss prevention (DLP) solution.

‎The following features make Reveal a more effective UEBA solution than Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics for protecting your organization from insider threats.

• Reveal enforces an organization’s data handling policy while monitoring and analyzing user and entity behavior. It prevents the data from being mishandled or used by unauthorized entities by restricting risky activities before they can cause damage. Security analysts can then look into the underlying reasons for the activity and take the appropriate action.
• Reveal provides user training at the point of risk with informative messages that emphasize the importance of adhering to the data handling policy. This training promotes a more security-conscious workforce and helps minimize the occurrence of accidental data handling violations.

Next DLP’s data protection experts can set you up with a demo to see Reveal in action. Get in touch with our team today and discover how this advanced DLP and UEBA tool can help protect your organization’s valuable data resources.

Fr‎equently asked questions

‎What is the purpose of User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA)?

UEBA solutions compare user activities in an IT environment to determine a change in behavior that may be a sign of a threat. The tools construct a baseline of acceptable activities and normal behavior against which a user’s actions are compared to uncover potential threats. 

UEBA relies on data and statistical-driven analysis to decide which activities should be permitted and which need further investigation by security personnel.

Why is user training an important feature of Reveal?

User training helps minimize data handling violations that can lead to unintentional data leaks by trustworthy employees. The addition of informative messages when a violation occurs is more effective at eliminating further occurrences of the mistake than simply restricting the activity. 

The user gains a deeper understanding of the policy and can modify their actions going forward.

What is a data handling policy?

A data handling policy is a formalized set of rules an organization establishes to define how data can be used throughout an organization. The policy typically identifies who within a company can access high-value and sensitive information and restricts others from using this data. 

A data loss prevention platform automatically enforces the data handling policy to prevent violations that put company resources at risk.