With the significant increase in the number of malware and ransomware cases worldwide, ensuring the security of your company’s privileged credentials has become a fundamental practice to protect it against insider threats, data leaks, and immeasurable financial losses.

For this purpose, there are several ways to protect yourself, such as implementing Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions. What many people do not know is that implementing any PAM solution in your corporation will not guarantee the protection of your company’s privileged credentials.

Your solution must have several functionalities that secure privileged credentials aligned to a good information security strategy.

To help with this task, we have chosen some essential functionalities that your PAM solution must have in order for you to guarantee the security of your company’s privileged credentials.

How Important is It to Keep Privileged Credentials Secure?

With the digital transformation boosted through the growing adoption of cloud-based models, connected devices, and development strategies, there has also been an explosion of privileged credentials associated with these devices. Gartner estimates the number of IoT and Industrial IoT devices to reach 24 billion this year. 

No wonder they are called “keys to the kingdom”, as they allow access to valuable information from the organization and which are often targeted by cybercriminals.

According to Verizon in its Data Breach Investigations Report 2021, 61% of data leaks involved privileged credentials. What’s more, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2020 report, the cost of a cyberattack involving privileged credentials is USD 4.77 million, 23.5% more than the average.

So, properly protecting privileged credentials is essential in the cybersecurity strategies of companies of all sizes and verticals. In addition, the information security teams must protect these “keys” from malicious attackers, granting access in a secure way and properly monitoring the actions performed in the environment through privileged access.

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is all about protecting those high-privileged accounts, credentials, and operations. Gartner itself elected PAM for two years in a row as the number one project in Security. And still according to Gartner, managing privileged access risks is virtually impossible without specialized PAM tools.

What Are the Main Types of Privileged Credentials?

Through privileged credentials, significant changes can be made to devices and applications installed on an infrastructure, which in many cases can affect business continuity. 

The impact of using them maliciously can cause serious damage, from violations of compliance items, which can lead to heavy penalties, to security incidents – which result in reduced trust by the interested parties and lost revenue.

Discover the main types of privileged credentials that are most common in corporate environments.

Local Administrator Accounts

We are all very familiar with the local administrator account that is automatically created when installing a Windows computer. The account provides complete control over files, folders, services, and local user permissions management. Local administrators can install any software, modify or disable security settings, transfer data, and create any number of new local administrators.

Local accounts with administrator privileges are considered necessary to perform system updates, software and hardware upgrades. They are also useful for gaining local access to machines when the network goes down and when your organization has some technical issues.

Privileged User Accounts

In an IT environment, privileged user accounts are those that are given comparatively more privileges or permissions than a normal user account. 

Any malicious activity carried out by a privileged account, either intentionally or by mistake, can be a threat to IT security. To address this, you need a systematic way to determine which users have privileged access and track their activities. 

For example, Active Directory has built-in privileged groups for privileged accounts. These groups are: Admins, Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, Schema Admins, DnsAdmins, and Group Policy Creator Owners.

Domain Administrator Accounts

A domain administrator is essentially a user who is authorized to make global policy changes that affect all computers and users connected to that Active Directory organization. They are allowed to go anywhere and do anything, with the limitation that they must remain within that specific account.

Service Accounts

Service accounts (or app accounts) are a digital identity used by an app or services to interact with other apps or the operating system. The service accounts can be a privileged identity in the context of the application. 

The main features and functionalities of a service account are:

• They are used by applications to access databases, run batch tasks or scripts, or provide access to other applications. 
• These privileged identities often have broad access to the underlying enterprise data storage that resides in applications and databases.
• Passwords for these accounts are often embedded and stored in plain text files, a vulnerability that is replicated across multiple servers to provide greater fault tolerance for applications. 
• This vulnerability poses a significant risk to an organizational entity because applications often host the exact data that advanced persistent threats deem to be an item of interest.

Local service accounts can interact with a variety of operating system components, making it difficult to coordinate password changes. This challenge often means that passwords are rarely changed, which represents a significant security consideration within a company.

What Is the Credential Management Lifecycle?

The entire Privileged Access Management process must be considered by those responsible for Information Security in companies, from the discovery of assets, credentials, and digital certificates and access provisioning to the visibility of actions performed in the environment, going through the management of privileges and the access itself, when the privileged actions are actually performed.

Thus, it is possible to consider the Privileged Access Management process in a lifecycle, which we call the privileged access lifecycle.

Before

In order to have a broad and efficient privileged access management, it is necessary to pay special attention to the initial phase of managing privileged credentials.

This phase is responsible for provisioning and guaranteeing access to certified machines and privileged credentials through digital certificates, passwords, SSH keys. Therefore, it is really important.

During

This is the part where privileged access management actually takes place, making it possible to track all user activities in the privileged session in real-time, monitor, and analyze suspicious behaviors from users and machines, etc.

Having a solution that can define and limit the tasks that a privileged session will be allowed to perform is essential for your company’s information security to succeed.

After 

After performing the two previous phases, your privileged access management solution must record every action taken in the privileged session. Through this audit, your company ensures that, during the sessions, there are no security breaches, can record all actions performed by users

What Do You Need to Consider for Credential Management?

There is a great difficulty for companies to implement this type of technology, since most suppliers do not offer integrated support, in which the 3 phases of the management of privileged credentials are interconnected, and that makes the companies opting for hiring more than one solution so that each one performs a different part of the task.

Unlike other solutions, senhasegura offers the market an integrated solution, through which it performs the 3 phases effectively in just one environment, facilitating the management of privileged credentials and keeping your company secure, free from fines and leaks of sensitive data.

How Does senhasegura Help Solve This Issue?

The functionalities of senhasegura’s PAM platform meet the most demanding cybersecurity requirements, allowing any organization to comply with cybersecurity management rules, regulations, and policies and at all steps provided for in the privileged access lifecycle.

Credential Management 

It is possible to define the administrator users who will be able to view the password for physical access, and the group of users that can use the remote access offered by the solution to access a target device or system.

Digital Certificate Management

You must manage your company’s digital certificates to ensure the security of privileged credentials.

A solution that has good digital certificate management automatically notifies those responsible for the information security of the company about appropriate measures that should be taken when a certificate expires or is about to expire.

This type of practice significantly reduces vulnerabilities and increases the productivity of the employee when analyzing this information in just one interface.

Access Management and Cloud Identification

Access management and cloud identification have become great allies to data protection, since a cloud provider has several security locks that prevent information security breaches.

By connecting the security of the cloud environment with your PAM solution, the coverage and guarantee of the security of your company’s privileged credentials are even greater.

Provisioning of Local Users

To optimize time and save money, having a solution that has the provisioning of local users becomes a great way to centralize and automate devices that do not have integration with directory services.

Scan and Discovery of SSH devices, Credentials, and Keys

It is possible to scan the environment and perform the automated registration of devices and their respective credentials in the solution. The scan can be performed across the entire environment, or applied to a specific network segment. It is also possible to define the search plugins to be used, as well as the device types, credentials, SSH keys, and authorized keys that will be identified. Finally, it is also possible to configure specific periods and traffic shape for the scans, in order to avoid DoS in the network.

Endpoint and Workstation Privileges 

One can run functions such as Windows UAC, Run As on local workstations, and thus run applications that require privileges, including session recording in Windows and Linux. Thus, applications authorized to use this type of privilege elevation are previously listed in the solution through whitelists, and their use is restricted to authorized users. It is also possible to configure blacklists to include unauthorized applications in the environment and map network drives on workstations.

Remote Session with Recording Features

Recording and storage of all remote sessions are performed through transparent proxies. Session video files have a high compression ratio, allowing you to reduce storage costs and increase performance when generating video files.

What Are The Next Steps?

To conclude, as it was made clear throughout the article, the importance of credential management is huge, as everything is designed so that all accesses are made with the highest level of security, traceability, and transparency.

Therefore, both in internal and remote work, the security of systems is always a priority and must be treated as such.

Do you want to learn more about the access management system? Request a Demo right now and learn more about how it works and other benefits!