Workforce Passwords

Understanding Workforce Password Security Risks

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Employees routinely use applications that provide access to sensitive data. These enterprise application accounts may not be "privileged" in the traditional sense, but they can provide sensitive access that poses risk. Moreover, IT often lacks visibility into these business accounts provisioned outside of the SSO.

If a business account is hijacked, such as by cracking a weak password, a threat actor can gain the initial foothold they need, or execute lateral movement to advance their attack.

When you consider these business account passwords are often shared, and re-used across different applications—and even personal accounts—you begin to see how the attack surface expands. A threat actor can chain together an attack pathway with one set of compromised credentials that gives access to many accounts.

According to the 2023 Verizon DBRI, 86% of breaches involve stolen credentials, and web application attacks account for 25% of breaches (largely leveraging stolen credentials and vulnerabilities) .

How Consumer-Grade Password Tools Fall Short

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While better than nothing, consumer-grade password managers fall short in providing the necessary safeguards, auditability, and reporting capabilities to meet enterprise-level security and compliance. For instance, consumer-grade password managers may be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks, session token theft, and installation of keylogging malware. Vulnerabilities in these tools can expose sensitive credentials to attackers.

Workforce Passwords works differently to counteract these threats.

Enterprise Security for Business Application Passwords

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BeyondTrust Password Safe, a leading Privileged Password Management solution, provides a built-in Workforce Passwords module that extends enterprise-class security, scalability, and auditing to business application passwords. With the Workforce Passwords add-on, business users get an easy to use yet secure method to store and manage their business application passwords.

Ensure Fast, Consistent End-User Adoption

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Workforce Passwords fits neatly inside user workflows, complimenting their productivity and delivering the password security your policies require.

By allowing users to quickly onboard through familiar platforms like the Chrome Web Store or Microsoft Edge Add On Store, enterprises ensure rapid adoption and secure quicker onboarding times. This delivers immediate security improvements by bringing employee business credentials under compliance with IT policies.

A browser extension enhances the user experience by simplifying the process of retrieving and injecting secrets. Fast injection encourages consistent use of the password manager for all business applications and reduces the temptation to revert to insecure practices like writing down passwords or using overly simplistic ones.

Minimize Password-Related Risks

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Workforce Passwords improves baseline password security across the enterprise in at least several significant ways:

• Empowers users with personalized security folders for their everyday passwords. Employees can maintain their unique credentials securely, straight from their browser. This drastically decreases risk of weak or unapproved password storage methods. Secure folders also reduce the risk of credential sharing, mistakenly exposed passwords, and other potential attack vectors.
• Gain consistent password policy compliance across all applications, not just the privileged ones. Ensure passwords meet specific security criteria, such as complexity and uniqueness, to minimize risk. Such criteria make it harder for attackers to guess or crack passwords, while helping organizations meet or exceed their compliance mandates for password policy enforcement.
• Reduce shadow IT by gaining real-time visibility into the applications your users are accessing to complete their daily tasks. Control the growth and spread of applications not yet sanctioned by IT or accessed through your organization's approved Single-Sign-On. Monitor the security risks and usage associated with various employee applications for possible future inclusion into your IT ecosystem.
• Makes it easy for users to do the right thing. Workforce Passwords makes secure password storage easy and second nature for employees, as it's designed to blend into the workflows and tools they already use.

All of this gets your organization closer towards achieving a paramount security goal— greatly reducing or eliminating potential weak points that attackers might exploit.

Satisfy Auditors & Cyber Insurers

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The ability to track, analyze, and review user actions is vital for regulatory compliance as well as for satisfying cyber insurance risk underwriters. With Workforce Passwords, benefit from a holistic view of password health. Pinpoint suspicious activities with access to employee business applications, so you can respond fast.

By implementing BeyondTrust Password Safe with Workforce Passwords, organizations can reduce the risk associated with password compromise—further making the enterprises more attractive candidates for cyber insurance coverage. This is in addition to the cyber insurance requirements Password Safe helps address around managing, securing, and auditing privileged accounts and credentials.

Consolidate Tools & Strengthen Identity Security

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The sprawl of multiple password management toolsets across an enterprise could entail:

1. Privileged Password Management solutions for managing privileged accounts and credentials
2. Session Management solutions for managing privileged sessions
3. Secrets Management Tools for DevOps and CI/CD toolsets, and other machine accounts
4. Key managers for SSH or other protocols or applications
5. Native toolsets for managing credentials that are siloed within a particular application or environment
6. Business Application Password tools

And some organizations may have multiple tool sets across each category—and all from different vendors!

BeyondTrust Password Safe provides a comprehensive, unified product to secure privileged credentials and sessions, DevOps secrets, keys, business application passwords, and more. Gain control of your identity security by streamlining best-practice security across privileged and non-privileged accounts—with a single solution.