6 Strategies for Securing Privileged Access

As an IT manager, granting privileged access to your users has become a fundamental practice. However, malicious actors can access these users’ credentials, resulting in a security breach. For this reason, securing privileged access is crucial. To do so, you must explore various strategies to ensure that only authorized users can access privileged accounts.  

Managing privileged access involves granting elevated permissions to specific individuals, enabling them to access crucial systems, sensitive data, and essential functionalities. These permissions are typically extended to privileged users, like system administrators, IT teams, application owners, and third-party personnel, who oversee vital infrastructure.

The privileged users hold a unique position and possess authority over critical systems and data, capable of impacting your digital environment. As a result, securing privileged access is critical to maintaining a robust cybersecurity posture for your organization.

Now, let's discuss in detail the need to secure privileged access.

The Need For Securing Privileged Access

Securing privileged access is crucial. If it falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to severe consequences, such as data breaches, unauthorized access, and even system-wide compromise.

Let's discuss the several reasons for securing privileged access:

1: Prevents data breaches and security incidents

Cybercriminals are adept at exploiting vulnerable access points, using them as entryways to valuable data and sensitive systems. This puts your organization at risk of data breaches and threatens its reputation and financial stability.

Robust privileged access management (PAM) is essential for safeguarding against these threats. Organizations can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access and insider threats by implementing effective PAM measures. This proactive approach helps prevent data breaches, intellectual property theft, and the associated reputational damage.

The importance of PAM cannot be overstated. It serves as a critical line of defense in upholding data security and ensuring the integrity of sensitive information. By prioritizing PAM, organizations can strengthen their security posture and mitigate the potential impact of cyberattacks.

2: Ensures business continuity

The consequences of leaving privileged access unsecured go beyond just data breaches, significantly impacting business continuity. When companies lack sufficient controls over privileged access, they struggle to manage and regulate system configurations effectively. This can result in operational inefficiencies and prolonged periods of downtime, disrupting business operations and affecting productivity.

Furthermore, inadequate access management protocols raise the risk of insider access to critical systems, threatening data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Exploited access can trigger system outages, disrupt critical operations, and cause widespread service downtime. This hampers productivity, undermines customer trust, and leads to financial losses, highlighting the urgent need for securing privileged access.

3: Aligns with Compliance and regulatory requirements

Failing to secure privileged access violates compliance and regulatory mandates governing data protection and privacy and places organizations at significant risk. Accountability for safeguarding sensitive information and adhering to industry-specific standards is paramount. The repercussions of neglecting privileged access security can lead to severe penalties, legal liabilities, and irreparable damage to reputation.

Non-compliance tarnishes an organization's image and inflicts financial blows that can be catastrophic in the long term. The fallout from a data or compliance breach can result in substantial financial consequences, including hefty fines, legal fees, and operational losses. Such incidents often trigger costly lawsuits and settlements, illustrating the profound financial impact that can ensue.

The risks associated with privileged access are wide-ranging and complex, underscoring the critical need for robust strategies for securing privileged access management practices. By proactively addressing this need, you can mitigate potential threats, safeguard business continuity, and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements.

Strategies for Securing Privileged Access

To effectively counter the potential risks outlined earlier, your team should focus on implementing comprehensive privileged access security measures. By embracing proactive management practices, you can substantially fortify your organization's digital defenses and ensure a resilient cybersecurity stance.

Here's how:

1: Implement role-based access control

Role-based access control (RBAC) emerges as a potent solution. It offers a structured approach to managing user permissions and fortifying privileged access. RBAC operates on a simple yet effective principle: access rights are assigned based on roles rather than individual users.

This approach streamlines permission management by categorizing users into predefined roles, each associated with specific privileges and responsibilities. By aligning access levels with job functions, RBAC ensures that users only have access to the resources necessary for their tasks, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized entry into sensitive systems.

By implementing RBAC, you gain the ability to enhance security through granular access control. By delineating permissions at a role level, you can finely tune access rights, limiting exposure to critical assets and reducing the attack surface. This granular control minimizes the risk of insider threats and external breaches, as users are granted only the permissions essential for their role, preventing unauthorized escalation of privileges.

Moreover, RBAC facilitates streamlined user management and administration, simplifying the onboarding and offboarding process. As roles define access permissions, adding or removing users becomes more efficient and less prone to errors. This not only improves operational efficiency but also ensures compliance with regulatory requirements by maintaining accurate records of user access and permissions.

2: Enforce the least privilege principle

One crucial strategy in fortifying the defenses against cyber threats is the enforcement of the least privilege principle. This principle revolves around granting only the minimum permissions necessary for users to fulfill their job responsibilities. It limits potential avenues for unauthorized access and reduces the risk of breaches.

By adhering to the least privilege principle, you can effectively control and manage privileged access within your organization's network. This approach ensures that users only have access to the specific tools and data essential for their roles. This granular control minimizes the likelihood of accidental or intentional misuse of privileged accounts, mitigating the potential damage caused by insider threats or external attackers who manage to compromise user credentials.

Moreover, implementing least privilege access minimizes the attack surface area, making it more challenging for cyber adversaries to infiltrate the system. This proactive measure enhances the overall resilience of the organization's cybersecurity infrastructure, safeguarding critical assets and maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data.

3: Enforce Separation of Duties

A vital facet of this endeavor involves implementing separation of privileges and separation of duties. These strategic measures are integral to fortifying an organization's defense against threats and unauthorized access.

Separation of privileges entails segmenting access permissions to prevent any one individual from attaining excessive control over critical systems and data. Multiple measures are included in privilege separation, including the segregation of administrative functions from standard account requirements, the isolation of auditing/logging capabilities within administrative accounts, and the differentiation of distinct system functions like read, edit, write, and execute.

Establishing the principles of least privilege and separation of privilege lays the groundwork for enforcing the separation of duties. Separation of duties involves assigning distinct tasks to different personnel to curtail the possibility of conflicts of interest and internal abuse. Privileges for each privileged account should be meticulously tailored for specific tasks to minimize any unnecessary overlap between different accounts.

Through the rigorous implementation of these security controls, even if an IT personnel holds both standard user and admin accounts, their routine activities should be restricted to the standard account. Access to various admin accounts should only be granted for authorized tasks requiring elevated privileges, ensuring a controlled and secure operational environment.

4: Implement Contextual Just-in-Time Access to Reduce Attack Surface

Make things safer by using \"just-in-time access,\" a strategy designed to mitigate potential vulnerabilities. This means permitting the use of the cloud management console only when needed, not always. When someone starts a session, they get permission to access it, but only for a specific time. This helps ensure that only the right people can get into important things when necessary and only for a short while, which keeps everything secure.

In short, Just-in-time access is like giving someone a key to a room only when they need to go inside. They don't always have the key, so they can't enter whenever they want. Similarly, for organizational SaaS apps and systems, users are given access to applications only when they have a specific task to do. This prevents unnecessary access and reduces the chances of a security breach.

So, carefully controlling when and how users gain access to critical resources significantly reduces the attack surface, fortifying an organization's defense against potential threats.

5:  Monitor & Audit All Privileged Activity

The monitoring and auditing of privileged activity play a pivotal role in bolstering the security of privileged accounts within an organization. This practice involves vigilant tracking and thorough analysis of actions conducted by users possessing elevated privileges, yielding a range of significant advantages.

Organizations can establish a comprehensive and real-time understanding of their digital landscape by closely analyzing and systematically documenting every action undertaken by privileged users. This proactive approach serves as a deterrent to potential misuse or unauthorized actions, enabling swift identification of anomalies and suspicious behaviors.

This objective can be achieved by using user IDs in conjunction with auditing and other specialized tools. Implementing privileged session management (PSM) is crucial to effectively identify suspicious activities and promptly investigate potentially risky privileged sessions.

PSM encompasses vigilant monitoring, meticulous recording, and stringent control of privileged sessions. Comprehensive auditing practices should encompass the capture of keystrokes and screen activities, facilitating real-time viewing and playback. PSM's scope should extend to encompass scenarios where elevated privileges or privileged access are granted to root accounts, services, or processes.

Furthermore, the significance of privileged session monitoring and management extends to compliance adherence. Regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, PCI DSS, FDCC, FISMA, and others necessitate data protection and security and the capability to substantiate the efficacy of these protective measures.

6: Conduct Regular Access Reviews

Conducting regular access reviews plays a pivotal role in fortifying the security of privileged access within your organization. These reviews are a proactive measure that enables the identification and rectification of potential vulnerabilities and unauthorized access points. First, it ensures that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive systems and data. This reduces the risk of internal breaches and malicious activities carried out by insiders.

Second, access reviews help identify and remove any dormant or unnecessary privileged accounts that might serve as entry points for external attackers. By closing these potential avenues, organizations enhance their defense against cyber threats. Further, regular reviews align access privileges with actual job responsibilities, adhering to the principle of least privilege. This restricts users from accessing resources beyond their necessary scope, minimizing the impact of a breach.

Many regulatory frameworks require organizations to regularly review and audit user access to accounts. Conducting thorough access reviews ensures compliance with these regulations, avoiding potential fines and legal consequences. Thus, it helps prevent unauthorized modifications or deletions of critical data, preserving the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information.

Secure Your Privileged Access via Zluri

As an IT manager, ensuring privileged access security is of the utmost importance. Zluri offers an access management solution that empowers your team to proactively manage, monitor, and optimize privileged access, thus reducing risks, enhancing compliance, and fortifying your digital environment. Let's see how.

Centralized Access Control: Zluri provides a centralized platform to discover, manage, and monitor access rights across your entire IT infrastructure. With a single interface, you gain granular control over who can access critical systems and data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. This streamlined access control ensures efficient allocation of access privileges, enhancing overall security posture.

Role-Based Access Policies: By implementing role-based access policies, Zluri ensures that users are granted permissions based on their specific roles and responsibilities within the organization. This proactive approach minimizes the potential for insider threats and unauthorized access attempts.

Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts: Zluri offers real-time monitoring capabilities, enabling you to track privileged access activities and detect anomalies promptly. Automated alerts notify administrators of suspicious behavior, empowering swift response to potential security incidents. Proactive monitoring and alerting enable rapid response to security threats, minimizing the impact on business operations.

Automated Access Review Process: Zluri's access review solution automates the access review process, allowing you to schedule regular reviews based on predefined policies and criteria. According to KuppingerCole's research and analysis, Zluri's automated access reviews reduce the time to audit readiness from months to weeks. Additionally, multi-level reviews enhance security and regulatory compliance.

Audit Trail and Compliance Reporting: Zluri's solution maintains comprehensive audit trails of privileged access activities, providing a detailed record of who accessed what, when, and from where. These audit logs facilitate compliance reporting and support investigations in the event of security incidents.

Take the first step towards enhanced protection – book a demo with Zluri today and start a journey towards securing your organization's privileged access.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1: What is privileged access security?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) serves as a robust identity security solution designed to safeguard organizations from cyber threats. By actively monitoring, detecting, and thwarting any unauthorized privileged access attempts to vital resources, PAM plays a pivotal role in fortifying the security posture of businesses.

2: Why secure privileged accounts?

Attackers are drawn to privileged access accounts and workstations because they provide a quick pathway to extensive access to an enterprise's crucial assets. This frequently leads to rapid and substantial business impact, making these targets particularly enticing for malicious actors.

3: What is privileged identity management?

Empowering users with granular control, oversight, and management capabilities, Privileged Identity Management (PIM) enables organizations to regulate and monitor access privileges to critical resources within the enterprise.

4: What is privileged account management?

Privileged Account Management involves the administration of sensitive accounts that provide access and privileges beyond the scope of non-privileged accounts. These privileged accounts extend beyond employee identities and can also include those associated with contractors, vendors, auditors, machines, and applications.