BeyondTrust & USDA-ARS are winners in the 2016 Homeland Security Awards

Government Security News just recognized USDA-ARS and BeyondTrust as winners in its 2016 Homeland Security Awards. The US Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service (USDA- ARS) stood out as the Most Notable Federal Government Program. USDA-ARS took the Cyber-Sprint call to action seriously and completed their task to secure the privileged users in their windows environment rapidly and efficiently, while also addressing legacy software upgrades and vulnerabilities in a streamlined secure way. We extend our congratulations to the agency teams and leadership for a job well done! BeyondTrust is also proud to have been recognized by Government Security News as the Winner for Best Physical Logical Privileged Access Management Solution. Hundreds of U.S. Federal organizations rely on BeyondTrust PowerBroker solutions to effectively and efficiently manage privileged access in their departments and agencies. This is such a critical capability in combating the risk of breach in Federal agencies, and we are pleased to provide government organizations with tools that address this need.

Legacy Software- Upgrades and Vulnerabilities

It is no secret that federal information systems are aging and managing them is a timely and costly proposition. If you review many of the FITRA and FISMA IG audits you’ll see that managing vulnerabilities in these environments is a concern. Many of you likely have older versions of software in your environment and need to upgrade to the latest version, but doing so with hundreds or even thousands of users turns this into a daunting task. With Powerbroker for Windows you are able to quickly and easily create rules that provided users the administrative privilege to uninstall old software and install new software without the need for administrative credentials. The solution allows you to create a robust set of “canned” rules to allow background update services to install updates and patches. This will have a profound impact on the number of vulnerabilities in your applications.

Elevating Specific Applications

Many of our government agencies have cases where one user, or several users need to launch an application with administrator privileges on a specific machine or group of machines. However, they don’t need full time administrator privileges or access to the username and password of a local administrator account as part of their day to day duties. PowerBroker Windows allows an agency to elevate the specific application to launch with administrative privileges without the user ever obtaining the username and password for a local administrator account. This least privilege solution prevents the user from login to the computer with an administrator account, or gaining administrator-level access to everything on the machine. They also do not have the ability to launch or install other applications using the “Run-As” function. Safe, secure as needed access. If your agency is ready to explore how to mitigate Federal data breach risks—without impacting user workflows or productivity, contact us for a strategy session.