Increase Security Visibility on Government Agreements with Docusign Monitor

While much of today’s government cybersecurity efforts are focused on the perimeter of systems and environments, the ability to monitor and detect unusual activity in those environments is increasingly a priority.

Rightly so, a recent Ponemon Institute Study, published by IBM Security, surveyed more than 500 major organizations and found that 40% of data breaches were initiated with the use of stolen credentials, while another 20% were caused by internal actors - intentionally or unintentionally.mBut the critical take away is the magnitude of difference between a insider type breach and a outsider breach. A breach resulting from internal user activity - stolen, intentional or accidental - on average exposes 10 times the number of records as an external breach.

Today’s hybrid government workplace can create increased vulnerabilities, making the protection of government agency systems, networks and environments increasingly more challenging. In fact, in the 2021 State CIO Survey published by NASCIO, Grant Thornton, and CompTIA, 20% of state CIOs indicated that they had experienced a cyber incident due to employees working remotely.

The report also found that CIOs are evolving their approach to cybersecurity to further address the distributed environment and human element of cyber threats–with 83% of state CIOs saying that adoption and expansion of enterprise identity and access management solutions will receive more attention in the next 2-3 years.

With this in mind, getting visibility into the activity going on inside your operating environments has never been more important. And this can now extend to agency agreements which can include everything from contracts, HR documents, grant administration and other internal administrative processes.

This will allow agencies to be more proactive in detecting, investigating and responding to unusual activity—whether from potential insider threats, or other malicious activity. It also supports the new Zero Trust security model, which aims to reduce attack surfaces and limit access to connected systems if a breach occurs.

Detect, investigate and respond to potential threats 

Docusign Monitor helps you to protect agreements with round-the-clock activity tracking, which helps agencies from being in “reactive mode” when it comes to addressing unusual activity.

Using advanced analytics to track Docusign web, mobile and API account activity across an organization, this solution provides near real-time visibility into your operations as they relate to existing Docusign agreements and processes.

The solution surfaces many types of events related to your account activity—like login attempts, updates to security settings and envelope downloads or deletions—to help identify internal or external threats. 

Monitor also provides ready access to detailed information about the activities that trigger an alert, including IP address, location and device type. 

By utilizing the Monitor API, agency security teams can deliver this activity information directly to their existing security stack, integrating easily with the software they’re already using.

Examples of Monitor in action for government

Since the nature of government documents can be highly sensitive–whether for national security purposes, government contracts or documents that contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII)–the ability to have proactive visibility into document and agreement related activity is paramount. 

As such, there are a number of document security scenarios where Docusign Monitor can help to identify unapproved or malicious activity, which can include:

• Large-scale data exfiltration: The unapproved downloading of agreements and documents from the Docusign platform.

• Updating security and administrative settings: The unapproved disabling or alteration of agency-approved security and administrative settings.

• Large-scale data loss: The unapproved deletion of agreements and documents within the Docusign platform—whether from an employee inadvertently deleting old agreements, sabotaging outsiders or disgruntled employee with malicious intent.

Docusign eSignature meets stringent global security standards

Docusign Monitor provides additional visibility for agreements in Docusign eSignature, which has critical levels of global security standards already built into it.

In addition, Docusign eSignature and Docusign CLM are authorized at the FedRAMP Moderate Impact Level and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted Docusign a Provisional Authorization for Impact Level 4 (IL-4). 

To learn more about Docusign Monitor for Public Sector, please view our on-demand webinar Docusign Monitor: Protect Your Agreements with Round-the-Clock Monitoring.