Why Privileged Access Management is an indispensable tool?

The insider threats remain one of the most feared threats. Indeed, almost 66% of organizations, as per our research, believe that insider threats are more likely than external attacks as the disguise of a legitimate user is truly lethal. 

Malicious insiders in disguise of genuine users, inadequate user authentication measures, poor password management policy are some of the loopholes in IT security, which is why compromised insiders often target enterprise confidential data. 

Here we have discussed three recent IT incidents where a Privilege Access Management solution would have averted data breach. 

Lack of authorization and monitoring: The challenge of insider threats has risen exponentially during the last two years due to changes in the work patterns. The hybrid work culture has made the situation riskier as employees and third-party users are managed both remotely and on-prem. This offers an opportunity for end-users with malicious intent to abuse or misuse the data. 

At the beginning of 2021, a large organization from the aviation industry in the Asia Pacific subcontinent suffered a data breach that involved details of thousands of passengers. A malicious insider turned out to be the culprit. 

Expansion of IT infrastructure leads to expansion of the threat surface and thus monitoring every end-user session is the only way to address insider threats. A robust PAM will not only ensure authorization of end-users including provisioning and deprovisioning of the users, but will also authenticate the end-users and monitor the session and raise the alerts if some anomalous activity happens.

Inadequate User Authentication: Authorizing and authenticating end-users before allowing access to the critical systems or applications has become very important for organizations having distributed IT infrastructure and hybrid work conditions. 

A government organization in the Indian subcontinent recently suffered data breach of thousands of applicants due to the absence of any user authentication mechanism. Such incidents not just put the individual identity privacy at stake but also maligns the reputation. 

Multi-factor authentication tool offered by a comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution ensures a secured access control mechanism for critical IT infrastructure. Multiple layers of user authentication become difficult for the hackers to circumvent the authentication process and thereby protects the data assets from unauthorized access. It eventually protects the business-critical data from misuse. 

Poor Password Management: Do we ever share our ATM passwords or internet banking passwords with others? In fact, banks always recommend that we change our passwords at regular intervals to ensure financial security. In large organizations where the business-critical applications, systems or databases are continuously and regularly accessed by multiple users, what extent of risks do they bear? 

Recently, in the middle of 2021, a nationalized bank in the Asia-Pacific region suffered data breach of millions of customers due to password hack. Industries like banking, telecom, government, healthcare and utilities are challenged by poor/ inadequate password management policy time and again. Almost 80% of data breach incidents happen due to poor privileged password management today. The vulnerability of passwords is more evident in a shared and distributed environment and is prone to compromise.

Password vault and frequent randomization of passwords, especially privileged passwords, helps to overcome the challenges of password breach. Deploying a mature Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution like ARCON | PAM automates the process of password randomization which is mandated by major regulatory standards. Not only that, the passwords are stored in a highly secured electronic vault and it helps in forensic analysis to understand who has done what to the passwords.

Conclusion

Digitalization is accepted and adopted by organizations globally to stay competitive with the advanced solutions. Simultaneously, organizations keep on striving with the emerging IT threats that challenge enterprise data security and data privacy every now and then. The above incidents vividly explain why Privilege Access Management solution (PAM) is an indispensable tool for small, midsize and large organizations in every industry. Deploy it and stay worry-free!