It's always fun to catch our competitors pointing to BeyondTrust educational materials as shining examples of the value for least privilege, and recently it came to my attention that just that has occurred yet again.
This time a competitor's blog references a recent published BeyondTrust byline article in Financial Risks Today magazine highlighting the challenges of desktop security and the perils of extremism with excepts from a new eBook created by Microsoft MVP Derek Melber aptly titled "Goldie Locks And The Three Least Privilege Desktops." This blog rightly identified this as a great example of why least privilege for desktops is critically important for today's enterprises looking for endpoint security balanced with productivity.
For those of you who haven't downloaded this educational and entertaining eBook then you can get it here. In it you will learn along with Goldie Locks:
The perils of over privileged desktop users. Those with full admin privileges can do whatever they desire with your corporate desktop assets and ultimately may use that privilege to delete, modify or steal your data.
The perils of underprivileged desktop users. Those with absolutely no privilege and will require someone with admin rights to answer pesky UAC prompts when simple tasks are done like running specific applications, installing critical software or even something as simple as changing the system clock because you traveled out of your normal time zone.
The joys of a least privilege desktop user. Here policy manages the elevation of privileges to ensure that only those who are supposed to be doing specific desktop things have the ability to do them.
Scott Lang, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at BeyondTrust
Scott Lang has nearly 20 years of experience in technology product marketing, currently guiding the product marketing strategy for BeyondTrust’s privileged account management solutions and vulnerability management solutions. Prior to joining BeyondTrust, Scott was director of security solution marketing at Dell, formerly Quest Software, where he was responsible for global security campaigns, product marketing for identity and access management and Windows server management.