Having “complete” network security involves securing the system from threats within an organization as much as it does the threats outside of it. The people who are given access to the network are, logically, the ones most free to compromise the system if they have a mind to do it.
Who is Watching Over Internal Activities?
You don’t have to look far to see how devastating an insider attack can be on a network.
- An employee of Trend Micro sold the personal data of 68,000 customers back in 2019
- In 2020, a Twitter employee unwittingly shared his administrative access with a teenage hacker. This incident further shed light on the fact that Twitter had, at that time, over 1,500 employees with top-level access to the system.
- This September 2022 saw Uber experience a data breach that compromised several of their internal databases. Here again, all it took was a sly social engineer and one vulnerable employee with the right access for this breach to occur.
Two of these three examples regard situations where the employee meant no harm. They were targeted for their insider access, however, and they were compromised by a cyber criminal outsider who did mean harm. Employee network access is the soft white underbelly of any organization. It is much easier to create a hardened security surface to detect and thwart attackers outside of the system, and much trickier to put up protections to detect and prevent potentially hostile activity from those able to operate within it.
Privileged Access Management Limits Who Has Access to What
This is the purpose of privileged access management software. It is designed to track identities and limit access, so that network activity is constrained to strict pathways and sensitive areas remain restricted. Access management software is able to:
- Monitor and manage secure remote access
- Monitor and manage remote support work
- Provide password management and multi-factor authentication
- Provide Endpoint Privilege management, which defines which applications can be used on which machines. It logs all activities and is able to define policies to fine-tune levels of access
There are several brands of privileged access management available, so which one would be the best fit for your business? We can help you find it. Call Secure Networkers at 281-651-2254 or reach out to us by email with your question.
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