Privileged access management (PAM) provides critical cybersecurity capabilities for today’s businesses. It prevents internal and external attackers from exploiting powerful permissions in an IT environment that could lead to digital assets being stolen. A cybersecurity attack can drain a company’s finances and destroy their entire network.
Unfortunately, businesses may neglect their privileged accounts and leave the literal keys to their digital accounts unsecured. They welcome hackers and insider threats, weakening their cybersecurity. But, if you want privileged access to work right for your company, you want to operate it with the right layers of security. Below are some tips to help you with this:
Enforce Stronger Authentication Policies on Digital Identities
When credentials end up in the wrong hands, they can disrupt or destroy your network, leading to damaging downtime and decreased customer confidence. It will become possible for other accounts to reconfigure your network infrastructure, permitting easier lateral movements, attacks, and thefts. If your network has these types of privileged accounts, you must enforce strong authentication policies on them and all your online identities.
Put Up Barriers to Access
If you don’t want your privileged accounts to be attacked, do not depend on use passwords for securing your access. Keep in mind that even less experienced hackers can guess or crack passwords. Thus, you must put up as many barriers to access as possible. Use multifactor authentication (MFA) which uses biometric authentication, time of access request analysis, and geolocation monitoring for verifying users. Even if hackers can crack all the factors, they will need more time and resources. Moreover, initiate password rotation as this mandates the use of passwords that haven’t been used before.
Beware of Software Privileges
Some software has privileges to automatically do important business processes or move throughout your IT environment. With their ability to move unchallenged, they are targeted by hackers. Once hackers gain root access, they can transform the programs into a type of bus for their malicious codes. Therefore, make sure you use only software that is constantly monitored by your cloud identity management team.
Manage Identities on the Cloud
As you want to save money and time wherever you can, you may choose to avoid investing the time and resources into a reliable identity management solution. However, you should not give in to this temptation. Managing your privileged credentials on a Word or Excel document can leave your privileged accounts going unmonitored. Indeed, a lack of privileged access management, the orphaned accounts could linger in your environment which leaves the door open for exploitation.