National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is coming to a close. Whether you have participated in the initiative or just read about it for the first time, please consider the importance of this government sponsored campaign. Over the last four weeks we have asked hard questions about cyber security. These included questions about your persona, and words you should avoid in defense of a cybersecurity breach. In the end, the point is to correct the mistakes we are making, and to educate those that are unaware of the problems around them. As a parting thought, please consider these top 19 (plus one) recommendations everyone should take away from this month (in no specific order). Doing these cybersecurity basics will help everyone just stay more secure:
- Use standard user accounts and not administrative privileges for daily work
- Never share passwords
- Never reuse passwords
- Never store passwords in clear text
- Securely document and store passwords
- Minimize the number of account aliases
- Minimize the number administrative and root accounts
- Rotate passwords frequently
- Ensure passwords meet complexity requirements
- Require multifactor authentication when appropriate
- Implement application allow listing
- Enforce the principle of least privilege
- Automate password management
- Eliminate hardcoded passwords
- Deploy adaptive access controls
- Monitor session activity to sensitive systems
- Understand obligations for compliance
- Monitor user behavior
- Segment your network
- If you are NOT having fun, you should get a different job (19+ plus one)
Finally, if you are wondering why these are so important and seem so random, stay tuned. We will have details on each of these coming in the beginning of 2018. They are not as random as you may think. ?
For more on how BeyondTrust can help improve the maturity of your privileged access management and vulnerability management programs, contact us today.
Be sure to check out our entire Cybersecurity Awareness Month blog series.
Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Officer, BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is the Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored three books: Privileged Attack Vectors, Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. He is a founding member of the industry group Transparency in Cyber, and in 2020 was elected to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) Executive Advisory Board. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust security and governance for corporate and cloud based solutions and regularly consults for global periodicals and media. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition where he served as a Product Owner and Solutions Engineer since 2004. Prior to eEye, he was Beta Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.