Privileged Access Management (PAM)

Privileged Access Management

Today, cyberattacks threaten organizations across the globe. These threats are impacting every sector of business worldwide. To prevent hackers from getting in and insiders from abusing access privileges, organizations need to implement a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution.

PAM software helps prevent external hacking or internal misuse of important company assets by enforcing least privilege policies and control applications to reduce the attack surface.

Privileged accounts present a serious risk. Cyber criminals are more interested in stealing credentials for privileged accounts than any other type of account. Thus, gaining control of privileged accounts is challenging—especially when you don’t know how many of these accounts exist within your enterprise.

What are privileged accounts?

Privileged accounts are the most critical and powerful accounts within IT infrastructure of an organization that hold the ‘keys to the kingdom.’ 

Control of privileged accounts is a major factor in compliance across regulations in every industry. Here are common types of privileged accounts:

  • Domain Admin Accounts
  • Privileged User Accounts
  • Local Admin Accounts
  • Emergency User Accounts
  • Service Accounts
  • Application Accounts

What are the risks associated with unmanaged privileged accounts?

  1. CYBERATTACKS

If cyberattackers are able to abuse privileged accounts with administrative access they are able to do much more serious damage to the target business than with ordinary accounts. They could easily use that access to install malicious codes, clear audit logs, and shut the entire network down.

  1. Unmanaged Privileged Accounts

If privileged accounts are not managed with appropriate controls, they can be compromised by external, malicious actors (e.g., a cyber-criminal) or internal actors (e.g., a rogue administrator). Both can lead to destructive damage unless they are spotted and stopped quickly.

There are many reasons that make an organization lack visibility into where privileged accounts exist:

  • An ex-employee’s access was never disabled.
  • An account is utilized less and less often until it becomes obsolete and is abandoned.
  • Default accounts for new devices were never disabled.

Every unknown or unmanaged privileged account increases your organization’s vulnerability and presents an opportunity for an intrusion. An employee may access it to perform unauthorized tasks, intentionally or unintentionally. A disgruntled ex-employee who retains privileged access can cause harm.

In addition, If a single privileged account is used across your organization to run many services or applications, when that account is breached, your risk increases exponentially. In that case, it only takes one compromised privileged account for an attacker to gain access to virtually any information within your organization’s IT network.

  1. UNSECURED PASSWORD MANAGEMENT

When IT administrators create privileged accounts, they often set passwords that are not complex and are easy to remember. Unfortunately, cyberattackers launch brute force attack to guess these passwords.

What are the benefits of PAM?

  • Reduce the need for administrators to remember many passwords and avoid privileged users creating local/direct system passwords.
  • Discover all instances of privileged user and application accounts across the enterprise.
  • Securely store privileged credentials in a vault with check-in and check-out functionality.
  • Automatically rotate passwords when needed — either after every use, at regular intervals or when employees leave the company.
  • Record and monitor privileged session activity for audit and forensics.
  • Ensure compliance with several regulations.
Contact Us