Federal IT modernization has become a hot topic as of late. We’ve seen it front and center in everything from the recent Executive Order on Cybersecurity to legislation designed to provide creative funding for the effort. In our recent survey of federal IT pros we found the cybersecurity risk associated with these aging systems was a major concern and modernization a top priority. After so many headline making breaches one can’t help but wonder what role this antiquated tech had in opening the door to insider threats and malicious external actors.
Ready to start mitigating the risks of your aging federal IT systems? Download our latest white paper, "Mitigating Risk in Aging Federal IT Systems with BeyondTrust" to explore many of those use cases, and the benefits associated with implementing these strategies.
So, what can agencies do to mitigate cyber security risk today and in tomorrow’s modern systems?
While agencies navigate the long road to modernization serious risk remains. There are four key steps organizations can take today to address the risks associated with many of these systems. These best practices will be successful in aging systems and modern infrastructures.
1) Manage privileged credentials with greater discipline, eliminate administrator rights and enforce least privilege. Adopt a least privilege model by removing admin rights from users and storing all privileged credentials in a secure safe. This mitigates risk associated with insider threats and the exploitation of privileges. It’s not just about insiders. Enforcing least privilege prevents lateral movement within an organization if a breach does occur.
2) Isolate legacy systems to reduce attack surfaces. To reduce attack vectors, segment systems to force all traffic through a proxy. Deploy an automated password and session management solution that provides secure access control, auditing, alerting and recording for any privileged account.
3) Improve the maturity of vulnerability management through automated patching. Deploy a solution that provides integrated, automated patching to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an agency patch process. To be most impactful, utilize a solution that delivers analytics and trending across the threat lifecycle for multi-dimensional reports on assets, vulnerabilities, attacks and remediation allows prioritized patch management based or risk profile.
4) Unite threat intelligence from multiple sources to better prioritize risks across the environment. Since the asset risk-to-user privilege risk pattern is a common attack vector, deploy solutions that correlate asset-based risk with user-based activity to gain a more complete picture of risks, gaining needed prioritization of the most impactful risks. Consuming multiple data feeds from in-place solutions into a single console can help mitigate additional costs and reduce complexity.
There are a variety of specific use cases within these recommendations that can address the unique needs of your agency. Check out this new white paper, "Mitigating Risk in Aging Federal IT Systems with BeyondTrust" to explore many of those use cases, and the benefits associated with implementing these strategies. Please also join us for the upcoming webinar, Mitigating Risk in Aging Federal IT.
Nothing makes things as clear as seeing them for yourself. Let us demo the use cases most interesting to you.
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.