Why You Should Consider Zero Standing Privilege
As modern organizations grow, so do their cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities. Large companies with thousands of members generally employ a wider distribution of administrator access to allow for rapid scaling, adoption, and flexibility. While this may sound beneficial on paper, in reality, it increases the organization’s attack surface exposed to malicious agents. The problem is that one compromised account can endanger an entire network, and with hundreds of admins maintaining 24/7 standing privilege, attackers can move laterally and swiftly spread malware to other devices. The solution is a Zero Standing Privilege model which measures and controls when and to whom elevated access is given on any device, system, or network. These models lock privileged access to all devices as a standard, and deliver targeted access just-in-time when necessary. Remediant’s innovative solution, SecureOne, was built to address problems with current access management systems while increasing discovery, visibility, and usability at any scale.
Zero Standing Privilege
Standing privilege refers to accounts with constant administrator access, all day, every day. Such high-level access allows users to do pretty much anything they wish on a device or network, from changing passwords to installing hardware and downloading new applications. Privileged access, if left unchecked or mismanaged, can lead to system breaches via user error, credential theft, and social attacks. In fact, a majority of breached organizations admit their breach involved access to a privileged account.
The cybersecurity industry is beginning to recognize standing privilege as a major risk, since vaulting secrets and rotating passwords is no longer enough to effectively manage access to critical system capabilities. Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) postures essentially eliminate the opportunities for attackers to move laterally through a network, even if they do happen to gain administrator access to a device.
Remediant SecureOne
The first step in achieving ZSP is a comprehensive understanding of which credentials exist and for what reasons. SecureOne offers organizations unmatched visibility of all accounts, devices, and systems on any given network. It does this by constantly scanning and discovering privileged access across the entire infrastructure and reporting the distribution to a single user-friendly interface. The SecureOne management console is also agentless, meaning no users are required to be logged in to endpoints to gather this crucial data. Agentless architectures reduce complexity and significantly simplify the support and network management process. Additionally, users’ privileged access can be revoked with a single click, exponentially enhancing security in under a second.
Remediant deploys multi-factor authentication (MFA) alongside Just-In-Time (JIT) administration to achieve ZSP. When any user requests privileged access for any reason, they’re prompted to verify their identity before being provided specific access to certain resources for a limited window of time. Access is then removed and must be requested again for future access. This method prevents the unnecessary creation of new admin accounts and significantly inhibits cybercriminals’ ability to steal sensitive data or install ransomware.
SecureOne’s easy-to-use platform allows executives and IT managers to view and assess the current state of their network’s privileged access risk. This helps them mitigate threats by reducing their attack surface using a variety of manageable dashboards. Multiple intuitive graphs display gathered access data based on groups, domains, servers, and workstations, enabling organizations to identify and manage the riskiest groups first, thereby decreasing the threat of lateral movement attacks in an instant.
Conclusion
Privileged access management tools have been around for over two decades. However, the average system was not designed to address the risk of lateral movement within a network riddled with 24/7 standing administrator privilege. Zero Standing Privilege solutions like Remediant’s SecureOne were specifically developed to resolve this issue by discovering, measuring, and managing the instances of privileged access using multi-factor authentication and just-in-time agentless administration. If you have questions about privileged access, Zero Standing Privilege, or cybersecurity best practices, we hope you’ll contact us today. We look forward to giving you the peace of mind you deserve when it comes to your information technology systems.