IT Security for Federal, State, and Local Government

As federal agencies evolve cybersecurity strategies and continue to mature their zero trust architectures, privileged user credentials are becoming a more attractive target for adversaries seeking to gain access into federal networks. In this article, BeyondTrust and Microsoft experts share ways to counter such attacks.

Download the article to learn about these and more steps federal agencies should be taking to counter privileged credential attacks.

In this Industry Voices segment, we hear from Kevin Greene, Chief Security Strategist, PubSec, at BeyondTrust, as he discusses identity security and cybersecurity challenges in the government sector.

Presented by GovLoop and BeyondTrust.

BeyondTrust Chief Security Officer explores the prevalent challenges in the modern threat landscape, shedding light on common issues faced by organizations. Morey delves into the evolving nature of attack vectors, emphasizing the significance of identity and privilege in contemporary cyber attacks.

The discussion extends to how identity plays a crucial role in both modern cloud initiatives and public sector endeavors and aims to provide insights into the best strategies for organizations to achieve identity-based security, offering valuable guidance on mitigating threats in today's dynamic cybersecurity landscape.

BeyondTrust Privileged Access Management solutions help enable NIST's seven core tenets of zero trust identify and secure every privileged user (human, non-human, employee, vendor), asset, and session across your digital estate. Control the who, what, when, why, and where of access.

Reduce your attack surface, minimize threat windows, and improve protection against ransomware, malware, advanced persistent threats, insider threats, and more.

• Enforce adaptive, least privilege control for all access
• Isolate, monitor, manage, and audit privileged sessions
• Prevent lateral movement and privilege escalation attack

Remote access use cases have exploded, and so has the deployment of remote access software. However, much of this remote access technology, even if not deployed urgently, was not deployed with security at top-of-mind. Other times, the software is stretched for inappropriate use cases (such as VPNs used with BYOD or for vendor access).

Like any other software, remote access software risks being misused or co-opted by threat actors. This is something that federal agencies, such as CISA, NSA, and FBI have warned about and provided recent guidance.

This paper explores how BeyondTrust solutions can help organizations meet the CISA, NSA, FBI, MS-ISAC, and INCD objectives for secure remote access software. Discover how BeyondTrust solutions are architected with security at all levels, enabling least privilege enforcement, zero trust, and enhanced privilege session management and monitoring.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Zero Trust Maturity Model Version 2.0 identifies access management as a core function within the Identity Pillar of their model, bringing the need for Privileged Access Management (PAM) into clear focus. Using these categories as an evaluative tool, an organization can pinpoint the maturity stage of their current Zero Trust Architecture and understand what steps to take to progress.

Dive inside this report to explore access management best practices, analyses of the new zero trust Access Management maturity category, and the substantial impact that Privileged Access Management capabilities can have for organizations on their journey towards Zero Trust.

Today, the United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and US Cyber Command Zero Trust initiative are working toward eliminating malicious actors and their lateral movement abilities by 2027. As the initiative progresses, several key challenges have been identified within several Identity, Credential, & Access Management (ICAM) programs across the institution and its agencies. This has revealed a significant limitation to current Privileged Access Management (PAM) capabilities within many Department of Defense organizations.

Dive inside this whitepaper to discover the ways in which BeyondTrust Privileged Access Management can empower agencies with robust access management, secure remote access, and credential management capabilities to overcome current DoD limitations.

Zero trust assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their physical or network location (i.e., local area networks versus the internet) or based on asset ownership (enterprise or personally owned). Authentication and authorization (both subject and device) are discrete functions performed before a session to an enterprise resource is established.

Read this whitepaper to learn how BeyondTrust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions map into guidelines set forth in the NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-2017 on Zero Trust Architecture.