Protecting Privileged Accounts and Privileged Access: Notes from RSA

Managing identities and privileged accounts proved to be a powerful theme this year at RSA 2017, which took place February 13-17 in San Francisco. With the security landscape changing and cyber breaches showing no sign of slowing down any time soon, many are trying to wrap their minds around how to enhance their organization’s security strategy.

Today, addressing cybersecurity concerns no longer means just building a bigger moat or a higher castle wall. To protect your organization, it’s essential that you take a look at the users inside the perimeter. Although technologies such as multifactor authentication and ongoing security staff training can help, privileged access management (PAM) technology is the fastest path to reduce risk. Again and again at RSA, protecting privileged access and privileged accounts arose as a topic that is central to modern security.

Many times, attackers have a primary objective to bypass perimeter security by stealing legitimate credentials to gain access. These attacks are becoming increasingly complex and harder to detect. As such, it follows that they are also becoming more common. Hackers often choose to impersonate “super users” – or accounts that contain the rights to perform administrative, maintenance and other key system tasks. These accounts are powerful, shared, anonymous, and problematic if not properly secured because businesses cannot operate without them. Employees, even the most dedicated, can present risks too: phishing attacks targeting privileged users and compromised insider credentials only increase vulnerability for a breach.

By securing existing investments, PAM can protect the perimeter of your organization from the inside out. Instead of an “all or nothing” access point to a company’s most sensitive data, the technology enables organizations to determine appropriate levels of access at the individual level. In addition, PAM is also able to manage activity, as well as analyze data and understand what privileged users are doing within the network. It is also very easy to integrate with existing infrastructure.  making employees’ jobs easier. Before safeguards outside of the organization can truly be effective, a higher-level understanding of what’s going on inside can help protect valuable business assets and lessen the chances of a cyberattack. We recently hosted a webcast that goes into further detail on this subject – check it out here.

Did you know Bomgar Vault was featured in Network World’s Hot products at RSA 2017? Also, check out this recap of RSA 2017 and get more details about how Bomgar’s Privileged Access solution can help you protect your organization’s most critical assets and systems from cyber threats.