The Danger of Privileged Access and Users

Privileged users are your most important resources and your largest potential threats.

Privileged accounts and privileged access are necessary to every business today. This role-based security model provides users with different levels of access that ensure an IT team can administer and manage the organization’s systems, infrastructure, and software, while also enabling employees to access the applications and data that allows them to perform business tasks.

While important to every organization, privileged accounts are also the most likely to be a threat and targeted by cyber criminals. This is because they allow the attackers to easily move around the network, accessing critical systems and sensitive data while remaining undetected and cleverly hiding their tracks.

Incidents involving insider threats have increased 44%, according to Ponemon Institute's 2022 Cost of Insider Threats report. The average cost per breach was $15.38 million, with the majority going toward containing the incident.

Companies are realizing that preventing insider threats – especially those involving privileged insiders – is more critical than ever as they can cause just as much damage as external actors.

Who are your privileged users

Privileged accounts, often known as superusers or administrators, refer to any user that is authorized, and trusted to perform advanced functions that ordinary users are not.

Privileged accounts can be used by many different entities in an organization and aren’t necessarily tied to job titles. For example, IT administrators, security teams, help desk workers, 3rd party contractors, application owners, database administrators, and services accounts, to name a few.

Privileged accounts can also be found all over the organization’s infrastructure regardless of physical location, including on the network, in the cloud, and for accessing SaaS applications. Common locations for privileged accounts are default credentials in servers, endpoints, and operating systems.  They can also be found in virtual environments, software, cloud environments, databases, service accounts, and most applications. 

These are just a few examples; privileged accounts can be found practically everywhere within an organization.

Why privileged users are a major security risk

Unsurprisingly, the more access an employee (or contractor, consultant, vendor, and partner) has, the bigger the risk of an insider threat.

Because of this, privileged users become immediate targets and hackers will spend time understanding who they are and what triggers they will react to. Cybercriminals focus on these privileged roles and groups in order to take advantage of their access rights to move around an organization and enter sensitive areas of a network, undetected.

Malicious insiders can also pose a serious threat to your organization. One breach can lead to system outages, wiped out databases, misconfiguration of core devices, and advanced persistent threats.

While more common for companies to spend time, money, and effort to protect themselves from external attacks, we are seeing that the worst threats may be operating from the inside.

How to prevent privileged user abuses and mishaps

Once you have decided what privilege data is, where it is, and who has access to it, get ahead of privileged-insider threats and mitigate risk for your organization. 

innerActiv enables companies of all sizes, across industries, with a fast actionable insider risk intelligence platform. Powerful analytics look across user behavior and data movement on endpoints, networks, in the cloud, and on-premises, to provide complete visibility, detection, prevention, and response to the growing insider threat.

Analyze risky behavior
The vast majority of security threats follow a pattern or sequence of activity leading up to an attack, and insider threats are no exception. Through continuous monitoring of user and system access, activity and data movement, a baseline of trusted behavior can be established to bring risks that you may not even notice to light.

Detect and triage threats in real-time
Insider threats are harder to identify and are invisible to traditional security solutions such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Real-time threat detection identifies trends and anomalies based on modeled behavior and custom configured security policies. Alerts and dashboard views provide real-time investigation and knowledge of “who, what, when, why, where” to determine how to respond to any vulnerability.

Contain incidents and minimize impact
When anomalies appear, determining whether the irregularities are, in fact, potential insider threats can be costly to an organization. In fact, impacted organizations spent $15.4 million annually on overall remediation and took 85 days to contain each incident, according to the Ponemon 2022 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report. By anticipating versus reacting to workplace shifts or suspicious activity, you can lower the cost of investigations and overall operational impact to your organization.

Meet compliance and workforce productivity
Secure work practices coupled with intelligence can identify and differentiate between well-meaning employees, and malicious insiders trying to steal sensitive business data. Built-in case management with deep forensic details and history of all incidences will provide the background for litigation or compliance if necessary.

Build security resiliency to mitigate insider threat

When considering your cybersecurity planning and readiness, insider threat management can no longer be ignored. Today the most highly regulated industries are leading the way spending on average about twenty-five percent of their security budget to combat insider risk. While every company and use case is unique, taking a proactive approach can help safeguard your organization.