Why it is essential to build resilience around privileged accounts?

Would you ever leave your home unlocked? Unless you have a lost the key or it’s an unintended blunder, keeping our home safe and secure is always of utmost importance for everyone. And that’s why people also spend money on some highly advanced surveillance and access systems available in the market that provides security against intruders and unimagined eventualities.

Likewise, any enterprise is at grave risk if highly critical admin accounts also known as privileged accounts are left unmonitored. If organizations fail to keep these accounts under check, malefactors can inflict a heavy cost given that privileged accounts have elevated permission to access highly-critical information stored in a host of servers, applications and network security devices.

There are basically two types of threats that loom around privileged accounts.

1 Insider threats: this is the most common threat for any enterprise be it a retail chain, bank, insurance company or media house. Data breach due to a compromised insider can erode organization’s hard-earned reputation and inflict heavy financial loses. Mostly, enterprises become target of unfaithful insiders as IT security staff don’t anticipate or fail to address this threat. There is lack of user behavior analytics i.e. no control over who is accessing the privileged accounts, at what time and for what purpose. Organizations that suffer data breach invariably have no any powerful real-time threat analytics tool such as Privileged Access Management.

2 External threats: today’s enterprises face stiff challenges in protecting sensitive data. Increasing amount of vital information is being shared with third-party consultants and vendors. Monitoring and identifying a possible breach becomes an ominous task for firms in the current IT environment where classified data could be administered by multiple vendors, essential to perform routine business operations. Any bad actor in this chain, just like an insider, could severely harm business by misusing privileged access authorization.

Phishing, targeted attacks, Malware/ ransomware attack are some of the other most common forms of threats that can cause systems breakdown as malicious codes tap elevated login credentials and break into the severs if unsuspecting user clicks or downloads unverified, unauthenticated links and emails.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behavior Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.