Auditing Your Privileged Accounts

Privileged account management (PAM) is a strategy for managing and auditing user accounts with more access privileges than the average users. Common examples of privileged accounts include IT administrator accounts, service accounts, and domain accounts. 

Before you put a PAM strategy in place, you first need to ensure that you have incorporated the principle of least privilege into your IT infrastructure. 

This refers to the idea that users are only authorized to access the data and resources they need to do their jobs – and nothing further. 

Only a few users – your privileged accounts – should have unfiltered access to company data and applications in this paradigm. It’s estimated that 40% of organizations use the same security for privileged accounts as standard accounts – which is a security risk. 

Having the principle of least privilege in place will reduce the likelihood of your company suffering a data breach. If a hacker, for example, got their hands on the login credentials of a standard user, they would be limited in the damage they could achieve.

If, however, they’re able to compromise a privileged account, the fallout could be huge. Let’s take a look below. 

What are the risks surrounding privileged accounts? 

Recent data breaches highlight the threat of privileged credentials compromise. In fact, Forrester estimates that about 80% of enterprise data breaches occur due to compromised privileged accounts. 

Unfortunately, organizations often neglect to manage their privileged accounts. Passwords are usually easy to guess, multi-factor authentication is forgotten, and logins are even shared around teams for ease of use. 

Remember, it takes just one breached password for a cybercriminal to compromise your network. Getting ahead of this issue is pivotal. 

This is why we advocate that all companies put a process in place to audit privileged accounts. However, this shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise you perform once a year. Auditing needs to be consistent and frequent. 

If you’re using a paper-based process to manage privileged accounts, then we would advise digitizing. Not only are paper-based systems cumbersome, but it’s easy to lose track of who has what privileges, which undermines the importance of auditing. 

How to better audit privileged accounts

With the right solutions in place, you can supercharge your PAM process, so it is seamless, effective, and boosts your security. Here’s what you need to do: 

1. Create a live directory of privileged accounts 

Effective auditing starts with a deep understanding of the state of your privileged accounts. You need to know who your privileged users are, what permissions they have, and what data they have access to. 

Remember, this document needs to be a work in progress that you review regularly and up-date in as near to real-time as possible. This is essential to accuracy. 

In the event that an employee needs additional privileges, you should record this progress in the directory too. The user’s privileges should only be escalated for a certain amount of time, and their permissions should be returned to normal as soon as possible. 

2. Educate your people 

Help your employees to use their accounts correctly by giving them detailed guidance. You should create and hand out corporate policies and expectations around privileged account usage. 

Things to include are rules for strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, and keeping passwords private. 

3. Assess privileged user activity 

Manually keeping track of how your privileged users engage with corporate resources is near impossible – but there are solutions out there that automate this task for you. 

These solutions use artificial intelligence to analyze user behavior automatically. They log user actions over time to build up a clear picture of expected behaviors. This means that, if anything happens out of the ordinary, your solution will spot it. 

Choosing the right solution will depend on your organization’s size and budget. We recommend chatting with a certified technician who can help you find the best fit for your business. 

4. Enable flags for suspicious user behavior 

A good PAM solution not only detects suspicious behavior, it alerts your IT person to unusual occurrences so that they can take action. 

Examples of suspicious behavior include a privileged user logging on in the early hours of the morning or a user downloading a large number of sensitive files. These signs could indicate that a hacker has compromised an account. 

The best-in-breed of these systems will block hazardous behavior or ask for additional verification from the user to ensure they are authentic.

Let us handle the audit, so you can focus on doing what you do best!

Unbound Digital can help your Johnson City, Tennessee business stay secure and efficient with a full PAM audit and solution implementation. 

Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Call 423-467-7777 or reach us online.