On November 2, 2017, the President of the United States’ beloved Twitter account vanished for an entire 11 minutes. The cause was first reported as a technical glitch, but was then later clarified to be the result of a disgruntled employee who suspended the account on the last day of their employment – the perfect use case for one of the most prevalent attack vectors… the insider threat. Bad!
The issue is not that the employee had permissions to suspend any account, let alone that of the President of the United States, but rather that entitlements to do so were still available to them the day before their departure. This is a classic Identity and Access Management (IAM) problem. For example:
- Should their daily permissions have been revoked when the departure was announced?
- Should critical permissions have been tapered off such that this problem could not have occurred?
- Should the employee have deleted President Trump’s Twitter account altogether in lieu of suspending it?
How the Integration of IAM and PAM Can Help
We have seen this type of problem before. Privileged access management (PAM) solutions are designed to complement IAM by enabling the concept of least privilege to be layered on traditional security models and entitlements. The disgruntled employee may have to go through a workflow to suspend an account, but in a PAM use case, their permissions alone are not sufficient enough to do so. In addition, all privileged activity can be captured such that an occurrence like this is fully traceable to the source. In this case, the event was obvious but if Twitter was attacked, and other privileged accounts compromised, finding the source for the malicious activity that lead to key Twitter accounts being suspended may not have been as obvious. This is why IAM and PAM together are critical to protect against insider threats like this in the future. How are you controlling access to your most privileged accounts? And, what deprovisioning processes do you have in place to prevent something like this from happening? If you can’t answer those questions, contact us today.
Morey J. Haber, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored four Apress books: Privileged Attack Vectors (2 Editions), Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. In 2018, Bomgar acquired BeyondTrust and retained the BeyondTrust name. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust strategy for privileged access management and remote access solutions. In 2004, he joined eEye as Director of Security Engineering and was responsible for strategic business discussions and vulnerability management architectures in Fortune 500 clients. Prior to eEye, he was Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. (CA), responsible for new product beta cycles and named customer accounts. 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.