When it comes to remote desktop clients, there are always some forms of user activity monitoring but what if there are some suspicious users? User Activities range from getting connected to the client all the way to what types of website the user likes to check out in their free time. In remote clients it’s mostly about technical specifications like how much CPU is the client using, or does it need more ram to run that specific application. But there is also a network aspect to the users’ activities. And that is some times more important than we might think. Because every IT department thinks that their network is secure and no malicious acts can be done in their network’s environment. That hardly is the case as we see more and more hackers attempting to infect computers around the world. Either by demanding ransom by installing ransomware viruses on the clients they steal or just starting to steal your personal data to sell it to some companies that might need them. And one of the best ways to protect yourself from these attacks is monitoring your users activities so if a hacker has hold of the client, they won’t do much damage. But what user activities can be monitored?
As we stated earlier in this article, there are a myriad of things that a user can do on their client. But there are just a few activities that can be monitored by IT department. No body likes to be watched by the IT department 24/7 for reasons that make no sense to the users like suspicious user activity monitoring. Plus we don’t have enough man power so they can watch the users at all times or is it ethical to do so. This is where automatic user activity monitoring systems come to mind. Although Microsoft provides some tools to monitor user activity like even logger and so on, they are not the ideal ways to check for suspicious users because they are not automatic. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool just for user activity monitoring? Actually here is where Sunfirewall’s suspicious user activity monitoring and reporting system comes in. But before we get to that why do we need a suspicious user activity monitoring system in the first place?
Suspicious user activities are things users do that are out of their ordinary patterns of behavior. A good example of this would be where users connect from. Users connect from on specific IP address most of the time. If the remote clients are provided by the company and the users are connected to it from the inside computer network, most likely it is the company itself that provides these IP addresses. But remote clients are made for remote use in mind, so it is likely that Users will have to connect from an outside network to the company remote clients. This is why automatic user activity monitoring comes in handy. These automatic systems can do a variety of things from checking when and where the user logged in from, their IP address and ISP are actually shown too. Today we want to introduce to you Sunfirewall’s User activity monitoring system.
SunFirewall’s Suspected User Algorithm is always monitoring where the users are connecting from to your remote clients. This can be information such as IP addresses, ISP and the Country they are connecting from. One of the main features of the SunFirewall monitoring system is that it automatically detects and tells you if Users are connecting from different countries at different time spans. This feature comes in handy when your system is compromised, and even if hackers that have got hold of your system are living in the same country as you, they will be most likely reported. Because hackers use VPN connections to connect to compromised remote clients 99 percent of the time, as not to get caught. So it is a handy feature to get an alarm whenever a user has connected from different countries in your network because of the reason explained just now.
The other thing that Sunfirewall’s User Activity Monitoring System does is it keeps a list of the IP addresses that have been flagged as suspicious previously. It matches these lists of IP addresses with the IP addresses of the clients that are trying to connect to the remote clients.. If a user connects with one of these Blocked IP addresses The monitoring System will report the suspicious user to you so you’ll know that something fishy is going on in the network. This feature can be used in a number of different ways. One of them is blocking IP addresses that you don’t want connected to the clients. For example you have found a client that has been trying to do something that you don’t want in the system, if added to the blocked IP list, you will be able to see and monitor that User if they try again to connect. Then you can evaluate again if the user is acting suspicious or not and if they are, you can deny them access and keep them out for good.
Aside from the features that come in the suspicious user monitoring system SunFirewall has other useful tools that you can use to protect your remote desktop clients. As we know Windows Remote Desktop’s default port is susceptible to attacks at all times, Sun firewall provides a feature to disable the RDP port at idle times and also a feature to enable you to blacklist countries that you don’t want to get access to your network. You can try SunFirewall for free for 7 days and see the features at work for yourself, so you can decide to use them in the future. Next time you want to deal with suspicious users in your network keep SunFirewall in mind.
