Unfortunately, we cannot exert an unseen grasp over the actions of our administrators. The risk of a cybersecurity incident or significant error is quite real, and auditors will pay attention to it if these rights are misused, even by the “ultimate authority in the universe” of our network security.
Recent instances of well-known situations that are directly related to the exploitation or misuse of administrator access and privileged credentials include:
- In December 2020, SolarWinds was hacked using a regular software update. Russian hackers were able to gain control of Microsoft infrastructure and install malware covertly.
Capital One on July ,2019) was attacked by a third-party actor who was able to access 100 million accounts and credit card applications simply by taking advantage of a misconfigured web access firewall. - Maersk, June 2017, through a Windows protocol flaw, hackers were able to infect Windows PCs and spread the NotPetya virus, which ultimately brought down the shipping giant’s entire network and resulted in more than $10 billion in total losses for the business.
Most likely, you’ve heard of these tales. Although it has frequently been cited as a prominent example of inadequate privileged access control, its lesson is still important. Logically, providing, maintaining, regulating, and governing end-user access to vital resources should take up a large portion of identity and access management’s attention. Most IAM projects focus on providing simple, unhindered access to a sizable number of end users while causing the least amount of disturbance to IT processes.
One common weakness in conventional security is the password. Your organization becomes open to attack if a user’s password is compromised, or even worse if the email address used for password resets is compromised. Such an issue occurs more often than we think. The fact is that many systems remain vulnerable and accessible to external actors. Only then, when these actors decide to make a move, do we learn about the gap. Until then, it may be just a data leak.
Identity and access management (IAM) services eliminate potential points of failure and provide tools to support them and spot errors as they happen.
Some of the essential IAM functions are:
- Manage user identities, Provisioning, and de-provisioning users, authentication, authorization, and single sign-on.
- Some companies have incorporated the CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) solution to fortify their systems.
The overarching IAM is divided into 4 sub-categories:
- PAM – privileged access management
- IGA – identity and access management
- AD MGMT – Active directory management and security
- AM – access management
All these solutions may be implemented as a stand-alone cyber security solutions. However, a much more potent approach is a unified cybersecurity platform that incorporates all of the solutions, and by doing so reduces the gaps between applications, users, cloud systems, computers, and so on.
