What Is User Behavior Analytics (UBA/UEBA)? [How It Works]

user behavior analytics UBA/UEBA

User behavior analytics helps you gather insights into what’s going on on your website. Without user behavior analytics, you’re going to miss out on great opportunities to increase sales, reduce churn rate, and identify cybersecurity threats. Behavior analytics help you capture visitors’ and your own employees’ actions on your website. Only Measuring your time on site or conversion rate won’t help you make data-driven decisions; you need user behavior analytics too.

In this article, we’re going to talk about user behavior analytics’ security and marketing aspects. So stay with me if you want to learn more. 

What Is User Behavior Analytics? (UBA)

User behavior analytics or user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) is a type of artificial intelligence and machine learning software that enables the security team to uncover insider threats that are not recognizable easily. It also helps product managers to track user behavior. With the use of user behavior analytics, IT teams discover patterns that indicate any of the below:

  • Security and data breaches
  • Credential breach
  • Privilege escalation
  • Data exflirtation
  • Privileged account abuse
  • Anomalous behavior

Since insider threats are the hardest to notice and cause the most damage, UBA is an excellent tool to identify them by collecting data and turning them into actionable insights before causing any damage or harm.

Another use of UBA is tracking customer behavior to understand the customers better. This is possible due to the collected quality data and different AI techniques.

Using this data, product managers and web and UX designers can improve their customer journey and overall experience, which will result in a higher number of sales. 

What Is User and Entity Behavior Analytics? (UEBA)

‘Entity’ was added to user behavior analytics by The Gartner Market because of the increased external threats rather than individual users. These external threats include any other network devices such as servers, routers, applications, etc. The only difference it has compared to UBA is the fact that UEBA, in addition to user behavior, tracks the activity of machines, applications, data, and servers. 

How Does User Behavior Analytics Work?

UBA gathers several types of data such as users’ accounts and permissions, job title, activity, location, shared service account, and security alerts. UBA compares the past user behavior information to a user’s current activity to detect any point of deviation by considering the used resources, session duration, etc.

UBA systems give scores to the behavior based on its impact. If the behavior does not contain sensitive resources, it gets a low impact score, but if it includes sensitive information, it will receive a higher impact score. This scoring helps security teams with prioritizing what to investigate further, while the UBA software restricts the user who is showing anomalous behavior automatically. Also, UBA’s machine learning algorithms minimize the false positives and come up with more clear-cut risk intelligence for cybersecurity teams. 

Product managers use UBA software to track users’ interactions with their websites. 

Track User Behavior Analytics Using WatchThemLive

WatchThemLive is a user behavior analytics tool that records visitors’ every interaction and movement using session replay software. This way, you can understand what works, what doesn’t, what users like, what makes them frustrated, and the reason behind it. Watch this video to see how session recordings work:

Sign up for FREE and snag session replays now!

You can start with WatchThemLive following these short steps:

  1. Sign up and confirm your email address.
  2. Add your Website to the dashboard.
  3. Add the tracking code to your website.
  4. Create free heatmaps for your desired pages.

Conclusion

Using UBA and UBEA is essential for any company if they want to keep their data safe, especially with the development of different devices that could harm you. UBEA is great if you want to track both internal and external threats. 

Cyrus Nambakhsh
Cyrus Nambakhsh
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