House Oversight Committee Report on the Equifax Data Breach Cites BeyondTrust Best Practices

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released its report on the Equifax data breach last week, and BeyondTrust is pleased that our capabilities are noted as best practices in multiple areas for the prevention or mitigation of such breaches.

As noted in the Oversight report, “A system administrator should develop file access permissions to only allow the necessary, authenticated users to access certain files – especially configuration files which may contain sensitive security information. Best practices dictate the ‘principle of least privilege,’ which restricts the rights and access of a user to the minimal amount necessary to perform their role.”

BeyondTrust was cited in the report as delivering on best practices in:

• File integrity monitoring (FIM) – “a security process to detect whether operating system, database, and application software files have been tampered with.” https://www.beyondtrust.com/resources/glossary/file-integrity-monitoring/
• Enforcing the principle of least privilege (PoLP) – https://www.beyondtrust.com/blog/controlling-unix-linux-account-privileges-9-best-practices/.

Additional recommendations and remediations delivered by Mandiant as part of the investigation include (among others):

• Enhancing vulnerability scanning and patch management processes and procedures
• Accelerating the deployment of file integrity monitoring technologies on application and web servers
• Enforcing additional network, application, database, and system-level logging
• Accelerating deployment of a privileged account management solution

BeyondTrust is unique in that it integrates these capabilities into a single platform that unifies all privileged access management use cases and vulnerability management use cases. This approach helps organizations by providing complete coverage over all users, assets and accounts, while integrating with existing security tools.

2018 continues to be another banner year of security failings, as witnessed by some of this year’s top data breaches. While Gartner has acknowledged that Privileged Access Management and vulnerability management are top security priorities for 2018, many organizations have a long way to go to cover the basics.

For more on how BeyondTrust can reduce cyberattack surfaces through the integration of user, asset and account-based risks, contact us today.