The move to the cloud began in earnest in 2007, as organizations looked for ways to cut capital expenses during the Great Recession. Fast-forward a decade, and the cloud is more popular than ever. According to a recent survey by LogicMonitor, 68 percent of workloads are running in public, private, or hybrid clouds, and that number will increase to...

Misplaced trust is a dangerous thing when it comes to cybersecurity. Attackers routinely take advantage of systems that automatically permit certain types of activity. Therein lies the problem with application whitelisting, which is the practice of designating specific applications that users are allowed to run on their systems. It’s the opposite of blacklisting, which blocks applications that are known...

Given the large and growing volume of privileged account credentials in the typical IT environment, most organizations recognize the need for automated privileged account management (PAM) solutions. PAM platforms provide one central location for storing, protecting, and managing privileged credentials so only authorized users can access them for legitimate business or IT reasons. However, PAM solutions have a reputation...

In our last post, we discussed the risks of granting administrator rights to end users at the workstation level. Local admin rights enable users — or hackers — to do whatever they want with a machine. An attacker who is able to obtain local admin credentials can launch a “pass-the-hash” attack, leveraging well-known Windows vulnerabilities to obtain higher-level privileged...

At Clango, our CyberArk consultants and engineers are often asked, “What constitutes a privileged account?” Many people who ask that question are surprised by the answer. There’s a common misconception that privileged accounts are only those that enable the highest levels of administrator access — for example, domain controller credentials in a Microsoft environment. However, any admin rights, even...

Demand for IT professionals continues to increase, causing the “skills gap” to grow wider than ever. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), by 2020, there will be one million more IT jobs available than qualified applicants to fill them. In a 2017 study by industry association CompTIA, 46 percent of executives said that skills shortcomings had gotten...

Many IT teams dread the arrival of auditors. Perhaps they lack a basic understanding of the IT audit process, and don’t know what the auditors are looking for. However, IT teams should recognize the importance of having a third party evaluate the organization’s overall security and compliance position, and facilitate the process through the use of tools such as...