Why privileged access management should be essential to your security strategy

Today it is essential to have a solution that manages privileged access to prevent increasingly sophisticated hacker attacks. However, to ensure secure protection without holes, you should include eliminating privileges in your cyber strategy.

In this article, we discuss Privilege Access Management (PAM), explain the importance of eliminating privileges in your security strategy, and discuss the relationship between privileges and zero trust.

Privileged Access Control (PAM)

PAM tries to control the rights of each user on the network to ensure the security of a company’s information. That’s because stolen privileged credentials are used in virtually every attack these days.

That says Fernando Fontao, channel account manager at BeyondTrustPAM tools are usually used to solve a specific problem: how to store privileged identities and manage their usage.

But with the rise of ransomware and hackers becoming more efficient in their attacks, taking away the privilege is the best solution to stop them. Yet many companies implement PAM without covering all vectors.

Many organizations believe that protecting privileged identities means keeping administrative credentials in a password vault. But the truth is that there must be a whole strategy that covers what constitutes a privileged activity.

Why use delete privileges?

According to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, more than 80% of the violations involve abuse of privileges.

Hackers take advantage of privileged credentials stored in local repositories, connected devices, and more. Therefore, eliminating privileges should be part of every company’s defense strategy. What does this mean? It’s easy; it’s all about changing the way permissions are implemented.

This change will not make the user’s life difficult or prevent him from performing his tasks. However, a policy is used – rather than a privilege that a hacker can steal. With a policy, you give the user the same permissions, just through a different, non-theft mechanism.

Because to carry out a cyber attack, a hacker has to go through a number of phases. The first is to infiltrate the company’s system. Then they try to escalate privileges; that is, make a lateral exploration move until you discover new privileges that allow more access. And finally when they launch the attack.

Thus, removing privileges through PAM prevents the hacker from moving from one stage to the next. It doesn’t matter where they entered, the attack dies if they can’t get through.

And applying privilege elimination will protect against various attacks. For example, the Lapsus$ Group carries out attacks without using technology. They do not exploit loopholes, vulnerabilities or code, but focus on gaining access to a legitimate credential through social engineering.

This type of attack is difficult to block using technology. Therefore, the best way to prevent this kind of attack is to eliminate privileges.

Relationship between privilege and zero trust

With the dissolution of the security perimeter, zero trust is created. This practice removes protections from static, network-based perimeters to focus on users, assets, and resources. So the new security perimeter is identity.

Zero trust requires any access to anything to be verified. It doesn’t really matter where you come from and where you go. The location and destination no longer matter – only the user and what they want to access. If a credential has a privilege, any person or system that controls it can abuse it.

Fighting back against today’s increasingly sophisticated hackers requires a comprehensive and well-defined security strategy that focuses primarily on deprivation.

Usama Amin is one of the founders of cyber snowing. com