Friends Don't Let Their Friends Have Admin Rights

“Hey buddy, can you give me admin rights so I can finish these changes?”

Sounds like a pretty common quote you might hear in your organization, right? It happens all the time, but is a poor security practice. Giving out privileges presents an unnecessary attack vector, since change control and the revocation of these privileges is rarely performed after they are assigned. The question becomes, though, if this does occur, how can you stop it—or at least monitor it? BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker Auditing & Security Suite provides centralized real-time change auditing and monitoring for Microsoft’s Active Directory, file systems, Exchange, SQL, and NetApp filers. The solution helps to establish and enforce entitlements across the Windows infrastructure by documenting when changes occur by attribute, asset, and user to alert, report, and even deny, when changes occur; authorized or not. Auditors, security professionals, and information technology professionals can mitigate the risks of unwanted changes and better understand user activity to meet compliance requirements – and eliminate friends helping friends do “bad things.” The PowerBroker Auditing and Security Suite is available in three editions based on the most important drivers to achieving your auditing and protection needs:

• Essentials Edition: Provides complete auditing and protection for Active Directory, and satisfies the primary use case we are discussing.
• Advanced Edition: Extends auditing to File Systems, and provides entitlement reporting for Active Directory and File Systems to ensure friends don’t help friends inappropriately modify or access files.
• Ultimate Edition: Provides complete protection of the Windows environment with the addition of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL auditing and reporting. This helps make sure friends don’t tamper with email or critical databases containing sensitive information.

Outside of monitoring Active Directory, File Systems, Exchange, and SQL, PowerBroker can remove administrator rights such that friends never even have to ask friends for admin rights to finish a task. That’s a true friend—giving you the right to do something while eliminating the risk in the first place. For more on PowerBroker’s privileged access management capabilities, contact us today.