The Importance of Discovering and Assigning All Privileged Accounts

Whenever a data breach hits the news, and the cause is compromised privileged credentials, the question that comes to mind is: could this happen to us?

Discover all the privileged accounts in your organization now with our free PowerBroker Privilege Discovery and Reporting Tool (DART). Download now

If you’ve been in IT for a while, you probably miss the good old days when there was a single privileged password you needed to manage. These days, it’s not only difficult to keep track of all those passwords, but even more so, keeping up with who has access to them and who uses them.

Privileged password management solutions can help you do just that. But, before you can effectively manage privileges, you have to make sure you’ve discovered all accounts. There are a number of use cases where privileged account discovery is critical to the privileged password management process:

• Identifying blind spots – Discovering where passwords are being used, or are simply lying in wait, helps to identify weak spots in security (such as passwords with no expiration), misuse of privileged passwords (such as those backdoor accounts mentioned earlier), and inappropriate use of privileged passwords (such as using the Administrator account across multiple application’s service accounts).

• Changes to the environment – New systems and enterprise applications can sprout up daily or weekly, potentially requiring additional privileged accounts. Running periodic discoveries will ensure you have every password identified, secured, and under management.

• Applying security to asset management – Scans of systems for hardware and software details do little to make your organization more secure. Password discovery simply takes the SAM/ITAM thinking a step further to include security.

Discovery also brings visibility to how and where privileged accounts and passwords are being used, allowing you to rethink the use of accounts, and the access allowed to them.

To find out if your current discovery practices are catching everything, we recommend downloading the PowerBroker Privilege Discovery and Reporting Tool (DART). It is a free tool that reveals elevated privileges on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix systems throughout your organization. With Privilege DART, you can:

Find and profile all user and local accounts; SSH keys; and Windows and Linux groups

• Identify privileged passwords, including default and hard-coded passwords

• Assess password age and other key indicators of risk

• Analyze credential, account and asset metrics

• Generate customizable reports on accounts, keys and systems exposed to risk

Privileged account discovery is one of many capabilities in the PowerBroker Privileged Access Management Platform. To read more about what use cases our solution can help you solve, check out our technical solutions guide.

And, if you want to double check your organization’s privileged account status, download the free Privilege DART tool today.