Privileged access management (PAM) provides some of the most important cybersecurity capabilities for today’s businesses. It prevents internal and external actors from exploiting the most powerful permissions in your It environment, stealing your most valuable assets, draining your finances, or destroying your entire network.
To help your business with this aspect of your business, here are some PAM tips you can consider:
Enforce Strong Authentication Policies on Privileged Accounts
If powerful credentials end up in the wrong hands, they can disrupt or destroy your network, causing serious downtime and decreased customer confidence. This makes it possible for other accounts to reconfigure your network infrastructure, allowing for easier lateral movement, outright thefts, and island hopping attacks. That is why you need to have strong authentication policies in place for these accounts.
Initiate Multifactor Authentication (MFA) and Password Rotation
Gone were the days when you can just depend on user passwords for privileged account management. These days, this practice is a recipe for disaster. Even the least experienced hackers these days can crack or guess passwords, or look for lists of compromised passwords to use in a credential stuffing attack. Thus, it is important to have as many barriers to access as possible. With MFA, hackers have to crack factors such as biometric authentication, time of access request analysis, and geolocation monitoring for verifying users. On the other hand, password rotation requires employees not to repeat passwords that may have been compromised.
Monitor Software with Privileges
This software is one that has privileges to automatically conduct important business processes or move throughout your IT environment. Hackers will target this program to exploit their privileges since they can move about unchallenged. Once hackers access the program, they can transform it into a type of bus for their malicious codes. Therefore, everything that connects to your IT environment must be carefully monitored.
Avoid Manual Identity Management
A lot of businesses tried to manage their privileged credentials on a Word document or Excel. When those IT environments scale, your security team may struggle to make sure they know who has what permissions when. This could lead to privileged accounts going unmonitored. Indeed, a lack of proper PAM solution could have orphaned accounts lingering in your environment and make it easier for hackers to exploit it.
Stop Credentials Sharing
This is applicable to regular identity security management and PAM. Users must not share their credentials with anyone. Should they suffer from a workflow issue, they must communicate it and not use the account of another user to do the task.
