The Most Critical CASB Use Cases in the Market Today: Detect and Alert on User Login Anomalies

As an increasing number of threats find their way to cloud services, IT and security professionals are turning to their cloud access security broker (CASB) to help them protect their most valuable assets. One indicator that a threat could be present is when two users log into a cloud service at or near the same time using the same credentials. If two or more users are logging in from different countries (especially if one or more countries are risky or unexpected), the threat increases in probability. And if the cloud service in question is business-critical to the enterprise, it becomes urgent.

At Netskope, we incorporate threat intelligence from more than forty sources into our Netskope Threat Protection offering, including intelligence about potentially compromised credentials. We consistently find that more than 10 percent of enterprise user accounts have been potentially compromised in a third-party breach, creating a significant increase in risk and potential for threats in those organizations’ cloud services, which often share the same or similar user credentials to the breached ones. So, when two users log into an important cloud service at or near the same time from two different locations, chances are the account has been compromised.

Netskope customers have deployed our all-mode architecture to achieve their most critical use cases, including detecting and acting on anomalies of all types – login, excessive activity, data exfiltration, and many more. We have noted 15 of these use cases in our recent e-book, The 15 Critical CASB Use Cases, and we’re highlighting them and others (and we want to hear from you too!) in this blog.  

Here’s use case #13: Detect and alert on user login anomalies.

How can a CASB enable this use case? A CASB sits at the intersection of cloud and security in between the user and the cloud service provider and monitors usage, enforces policy, and guards against threats. Whereas the breadth of anomalies that our customers detect require a breadth of deployment architectures, in order to detect and alert on user login anomalies, many organizations choose to deploy in a reverse proxy or API-based deployment. This use case can also work in a forward proxy architecture if all of the users who happen to be logging in are managed by Netskope. The best of all scenarios is when customers deploy Netskope as an all-mode architecture – in that case, they get the dual benefit of being able to detect anomalies across all services regardless of access method, while also detecting unmanaged users’ unauthorized logins.

Beyond deployment choices, here are seven critical functional requirements that are needed to achieve this use case:

• Correlate users’ identities (e.g., [email protected] = [email protected] = [email protected])
• See and control usage in both sanctioned and unsanctioned services
• Use a combination of rules and machine learning to detect cloud behavior anomalies
• Detect and enforce policies by IP address, network location, or geo location
• Decrypt SSL and decode the unpublished API to understand the activity and transaction (for forward proxy)
• Leverage SSO workflows to mitigate potential threats and take corrective actions such as MFA, 2FA or a force change of enterprise password before allowing access into cloud services
• Integrate threat knowledge into existing SOC and intelligence programs

How are you detecting and taking action on user login anomalies in cloud services? We want to hear from you.

Learn more about this and 14 additional most impactful use cases by downloading The 15 Critical CASB Use Cases.