Product Overview of ObserveIT (Proofpoint)
ObserveIT, a component of Proofpoint’s cybersecurity solutions, is a comprehensive Insider Threat Management (ITM) platform designed to help organizations identify, detect, and mitigate insider threats and data exfiltration.
What ObserveIT Does
ObserveIT provides organizations with a robust solution to manage and reduce the risks associated with insider threats, which account for over 30% of data breaches. The platform offers real-time visibility into user activity, data interactions, and threat context, enabling security teams to proactively detect and respond to potential security incidents.
Key Features and Functionality
Comprehensive Visibility
ObserveIT offers complete visibility into user and data activity across various endpoints, including Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux, virtual machines, and cloud applications. This visibility is enhanced through user attribution via an easy-to-understand, visual timeline and flexible, real-time session recording.
Proactive Detection
The platform includes an extensive Insider Threat Library with over 320 pre-configured indicators of risk, built with feedback from 1,900 customers and leveraging guidelines from NIST, MITRE, and CERT. This library helps detect unauthorized user activity, data exfiltration, privilege abuse, and security controls bypass in real-time.
Faster Investigations
ObserveIT streamlines incident investigations by providing detailed visibility into user intent and cause. It allows security teams to gather, package, and export necessary evidence without needing to switch between multiple tools, thereby saving time and reducing investigation costs.
Accelerated Response
The platform integrates real-time threat visibility with unified security protocols to accelerate incident response. It includes built-in security awareness notifications and prevention capabilities, enabling organizations to respond faster to incidents and drive meaningful behavior change among users.
User Activity Monitoring
ObserveIT tracks users with suspicious or out-of-policy actions on workstations, servers, and web-based applications. The Risk Dashboard prioritizes users for further investigation based on their risk scores, helping security teams focus on the most critical threats.
File Activity Monitoring
The platform monitors and alerts on file activities such as downloads, exports, and movements to cloud storage services or USB devices. It also tracks emails sent from email clients and files attached to or saved from these clients.
Live Activity Replay
ObserveIT captures screenshots of user actions and file movements for a preset time period before and after an out-of-policy alert is triggered. This feature provides forensic evidence and helps meet privacy compliance requirements.
Policy Notification and Enforcement
The platform enforces company policies and security regulations through flexible warning and blocking notifications in real-time. It prevents malicious or unauthorized commands and logs off users from unauthorized machines, closing harmful applications as needed.
Website Categorization
ObserveIT automatically detects and categorizes websites that end users are browsing, generating alerts for categories such as gaming, adult content, infected or malicious websites, and phishing sites. It includes 42 out-of-the-box website categories.
Privacy Compliance and Scalability
The platform ensures user privacy through anonymization in the dashboard and web console. It features a lightweight, user-mode agent that is easy to install, does not require reboots, and is compatible with various operating systems and cloud infrastructures, making it highly scalable.
Additional Benefits
- Integrated Incident Response Workflow: Streamlines and accelerates cross-functional coordination to reduce the mean time to respond (MTTR) to insider incidents.
- Simplified Cloud Deployment: Offers a cloud-based deployment that delivers organizational agility and minimizes time to value for resource-constrained cybersecurity teams.
- Reporting and Auditing: Provides comprehensive reporting capabilities, including alerts, website visits, document printing, USB storage device connections, and more, to enhance security operations and regulatory compliance.
In summary, ObserveIT by Proofpoint is a powerful tool for managing insider threats, offering comprehensive visibility, proactive detection, faster investigations, and accelerated response capabilities, all while ensuring privacy compliance and scalability.