Researchers who study large-scale data breaches have concluded that nearly all successful attacks involve privileged account compromise. In the 2017 Yahoo! breach, attackers began by stealing a user’s credentials, then harvested privileged credentials from the local PC in order to gain access to higher-level assets. The 2015 attacks on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) followed a similar...

In our last post, we explained the difference between privileged identity management (PIM) and privileged access management (PAM). PIM involves the identification of administrative accounts, which already exist on systems, and the association of individual users with those accounts. PAM secures privileged credentials and ensures they are used in accordance with established policy. We also defined the term “privileged,”...

Rapid software development processes, IT automation, and the cloud enable organizations to respond more quickly to changing business demands. Increased agility brings greater risk, however. There are more opportunities for attackers to obtain privileged credentials that give them access to sensitive systems and data. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes require that DevOps teams have privileged access to...

“Trust no one.” That was one of the taglines for The X-Files, the popular science-fiction television series about FBI agents who investigate a series of bizarre, supernatural cases. It’s also becoming a mantra for modern network security Faced with relentless cyber threats and expanding attack vectors, network security pros have begun to embrace a “zero trust” model as an...

As growing numbers of users need access to more on-premises and cloud resources, identity and access management (IAM) has become increasingly challenging. It’s virtually impossible to keep up with access requests using manual processes, so errors are bound to creep in. This can lead to orphaned accounts that remain active after the user changes roles or leaves the organization,...

IT teams are overstretched. Business units need new applications and services spun up faster than ever before. At the same time, IT must maintain an ever-larger and increasingly complex environment and ensure robust security. New threats and vulnerabilities emerge every day, and security alerts never seem to let up. That’s why automation has become an essential part of any...