Employees and vendors with remote access to systems and privileged credentials are prime targets for cyberattacks. These privileged accounts are an attacker’s “prize” because they are essentially the ‘keys to the kingdom’ of a company’s network. Once they compromise your account, they can move laterally throughout your network, wreaking havoc along the way.
In a previous post, we talked about securing vendor access within your organization, as a place to start in shoring up your security posture to protect your most critical assets from a cyberbreach. Once you’ve got a good policy in place for those vendors, that’s a huge risk mitigated. Now, what about that ‘trusted’ group of insiders that have access to sensitive data and systems?
Who are privileged insiders?
When it comes to securing privileged access, we’ve recommended to work under the assumption that hackers are already in your network. Perimeter security is important, but a successful security strategy will also provide security measures from the inside out.
In most organizations, the service desk has a lot of access, and often use the same credentials across all of the workstations in the environment. And often, the service desk is not seen as a ‘threat’ since they are a trusted group. Moreover, the high rate of employee turnover within the service desk escalates this issue to a higher risk. So why not put the same controls in place for insiders that you do for vendors?
Implement a solution that allows you to control, manage, monitor and audit remote sessions, giving your more insight into their activity. Solutions like Bomgar Privileged Access give you the capability to set access permissions at a granular level, so insiders only have access to the systems necessary to perform their job, and for the appropriate amount of time.
This step is the second in the series, Bomgar’s Six Steps to Secure Access for Privileged Insiders and Vendors. For more details, check out this on-demand webinar, that gives more details on each step to help you build a successful defense-in-depth strategy.
Chris Herrin, Senior Product Manager at BeyondTrust
Chris Herrin is the Senior Product Manager for Privileged Remote Access and all third-party integrations for the BeyondTrust portfolio. He has been with BeyondTrust (Bomgar) for the last five years, beginning his career on the Sales Development and Solutions Engineering teams. Chris is an active Georgia Bulldogs fan, and has to mention his corgis in every presentation he is a part of.
