Gurucul, a leader in behavior based security and fraud analytics technology for on-premises and the cloud, has been named the Platinum Award for ‘Best User & Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) Solution’ in the American Security Today 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Awards.

Gurucul Risk Analytics (GRA) is a multi-use UEBA platform with an open architecture that ingests virtually any dataset for desired attributes, and includes configurable out-of-the-box analytics.

GRA is changing the way government organizations and enterprises protect themselves against insider threats, account compromise, IP and data theft, external attacks, and data exfiltration on-premises and in the cloud.

The platform incorporates security intelligence, big data analytics, machine learning, anomaly detection and predictive risk-scoring algorithms to reduce the attack surface for accounts, remove unnecessary access rights and privileges, and to identify, predict and prevent breaches.

(Gurucul is transforming the enterprise security with user behavior based machine learning and predictive analytics. Using identity to monitor for threats, Gurucul provides Actionable Risk Intelligence™. Courtesy of Gurucul and YouTube.)

GRA monitors user behaviors to detect threats that appear as “normal” activity to traditional security products, including stolen login credentials and malicious authorized insiders.

It is a proven, mature UEBA platform that is successfully deployed worldwide by enterprises and government agencies.

While most UEBA solutions are on-premises only, or require another partner solution for cloud visibility, Gurucul GRA provides a cloud API-based solution for visibility into SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and IDaaS solutions to uniquely span on-premise and the cloud.

Organizations with IT resources that span the data center and cloud struggle to detect and prevent data exfiltration and privilege abuse.

(See How Gurucul’s User & Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) solution helped Allina Health with their unique use cases including protecting VIP data during Superbowl 2018. Courtesy of Gurucul and Vimeo. Posted in April 2018.)

Gurucul’s hybrid behavior analytics gives GRA 360 degree visibility to detect threats that evade cloud and data-center only security solutions.

GRA, which runs on Hadoop, supports an open choice of big data repositories and can be deployed flexibly on any leading big data infrastructure.

This protects existing IT investments, eliminates data duplication, and reduces storage fees.

Customers can simply layer Gurucul’s advanced security analytics engine on top of their existing or new Hadoop, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and Elastic/ELK deployments.

Unlike alternatives, GRA goes beyond rules, signatures and patterns with machine learning models that learn normal base lines and apply advanced security intelligence and analytics to detect abnormal user behavior.

In addition to UEBA, GRA reduces the attack surface area of access through identity analytics (IdA).

(How Important is Identity as a Threat Plane? Learn More, courtesy of Gurucul and Vimeo. Posted in Nov 2018.)

GRA applies a risk-based approach for certifications, access requests and approvals to identify and remove excess access, access outliers, and orphan and dormant accounts.

By uniquely combining UEBA with IdA, GRA identifies with precision the compromise and misuse of identity, which is the root of most modern cyber threats.

Taking machine learning to the next level, GRA includes 300+ ready-to-use machine learning models for on-premises, cloud or hybrid environments.

Gurucul STUDIO, a unique part of GRA, enables organizations in high security industries like government, intelligence, law enforcement, etc. to define custom machine learning models to meet their specific requirements, customize risk weightings and develop their own machine learning models without any coding.

An industry-first, GRA’s Self-Audit capabilities empower government agency end users to monitor their own accounts for anomalous and suspicious access and activity.

Another area where GRA excels over the competition is in privileged access management (PAM). Traditional PAM solutions perform discovery at the account level.

However, many organizations assign high privilege entitlements to “normal” accounts as well.

Manually discovering high risk entitlements that exist outside of privileged accounts is impossible.

Consider an organization with 10,000 identities, where each identity has 10 accounts with 10 entitlements. That would equal 1 million entitlements.

Gurucul GRA solves this big data security challenge using analytics and machine learning to scour through identities and accounts and identify privileged access down to the entitlement level across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.

For Federal Agencies, Gurucul Provides the Following Unique Capabilities and Value-Add:

• Predictive security analytics from user and entity behavior machine learning models
• Detection of account compromise, data exfiltration, access abuse and insider threats
• Identity analytics (IdA) to reduce the attack surface area due to excess access and access outliers
• Risk-based certifications for IAM (identity and access management), plus discovery of privileged access risks
• Self-audits for security awareness, deterrence and detection of identity and data theft
• Custom model development without coding or a minimal knowledge of data science
• Ability to model attributes from any desired dataset, including de-coupled big data

Gurucul GRA is Built to Scale

Many customers have over 250,000 employees, and one health insurance customer uses GRA to analyze 8 million identities and 500 big data nodes.

• Another health insurer is using Gurucul on top of hundreds of Hortonworks big data nodes to apply advanced analytics to over 15 million identities belonging to employees, partners and customers.
• A large financial institution has deployed Gurucul advanced security analytics with its custom cloud big data lake on AWS to risk score access and activity, reduce access risks and detect unknown threats.
• Another insurance firm deployed Self Audits from GRA to over 60,000 end users to raise security awareness, provide deterrence and collaborate with users to detect identity theft and abuse.

“The Gurucul GRA platform enables government agencies and Fortune 500 companies managing national infrastructure to protect their assets against the most hard to detect threats including malicious insiders as well as compromised hosts and accounts using behavior analytics,” explains Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul.

“We are pleased to have been recognized by the Homeland Security Awards as the top UEBA solution and for our contributions to national security.”

The annual ‘ASTORS’ awards honor distinguished solutions that deliver enhanced value, benefit and intelligence to end users in a variety of government, homeland security, enterprise and public safety markets.

Nominations were evaluated by a panel of experts for technical innovation, interoperability, specific impact within the category, overall impact to the industry, relatability to other industry technologies, and application feasibility outside of the industry.

“The United States is increasingly focusing on protecting IT/cyber security networks, and government and security professionals are calling on innovative companies like those honored with 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Awards, to help them do so,” said Michael Madsen, co-founder and publisher of American Security Today.

The Gurucul Risk Analytics (GRA) platform ingests and analyzes massive amounts of data on user and entity behaviors from virtually any data source, including the network, IT systems, cloud platforms, applications, IoT, social media, etc.

By applying identity-centric, model-driven data science, machine learning, anomaly detection and predictive risk-scoring algorithms GRC can identify not just anomalous behavior, but risk-scored behavior indicative of security threats.

Gurucul has the industry’s largest machine learning library with more than 1300 models, which allows GRA to detect unknown threats in real-time, and GRA’s accuracy and real-time alerting saves security analyst time and resources and allows organizations to stop potential damage before it occurs.

The Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards Program is specifically designed to honor distinguished government and vendor solutions that deliver enhanced value, benefit and intelligence to end users in a variety of government, homeland security and public safety vertical markets.

Over 130 distinguished guests representing National, State and Local Governments, and Industry Leading Corporate Firms, gathered from across North America, Europe and the Middle East to be honored among their peers in their respective fields which included:

• The Department of Homeland Security Federal Protective Service (FPS)
• Argonne National Laboratory
• The Department of Homeland Security
• The Department of Justice
• The Security Exchange Commission Office of Personnel Management
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection
• Viasat, Hanwha Techwin, Lenel, Konica Minolta Business Solutions, Verint, Canon U.S.A., BriefCam, Pivot3, Milestone Systems, Allied Universal, Ameristar Perimeter Security and More!

The Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards is the preeminent U.S. Homeland Security Awards Program highlighting the most cutting-edge and forward-thinking security solutions coming onto the market today, to ensure our readers have the information they need to stay ahead of the competition, and keep our Nation safe – one facility, street, and city at a time.

The 2018 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program was Proudly Sponsored by ATI Systems, Attivo Networks, Automatic Systems, Desktop Alert, and Royal Holdings Technologies.