The Ponemon Institute along with Trend Micro recently surveyed more than 700 ITprofessionals on the subject of the human factor in data breaches. According to the survey, 78 percent of respondents have experienced a data breach as a result of negligent or malicious employees or other insiders. This doesn’t surprise us here at BeyondTrust. We deal with businesses and organizations every day that are looking for solutions to mitigate insider attacks regardless if it’s intentional or negligent misuse of privilege.
Every enterprise has good people and bad people. Between dumb IT errors and spur-of-the-moment decisions, an environment where users have unlimited access to company resources is a dangerous place.
The survey also identified the top 10 practices employees routinely engage in that put companies at greater risk. The most popular risky practice is connecting computers to the Internet through an insecure wireless network. This employee practice can be easily resolved by using BeyondTrust PowerBroker Desktops which allows restricted users to maintain authorized computer settings such as, connecting to local printers, IP configuration settings to connect to a wireless networks, even the ability to change time zones. Another common risky practice among negligent employees is reusing the same password and username on different websites. This can be put to a stop by deploying PowerBroker Identity Services, a centralized enterprise solution to authenticate users in the same way across all platforms, which can enforce user password policy for password aging, history, etc.
The BeyondTrust ecosystem creates a least privilege environment within enterprises to reduce the risk of insider threats. Monitoring and alerts, reporting, and management tools siphon through web and code based interfaces to centrally control requested network tasks. As enterprises begin to pay more attention to privilege and access, they begin to embrace the principal of least privilege as it relates to improving overall security.
