As we continue our march through the Privileged User Lifecycle, we have locked down privileged accounts as tightly as needed. But that’s not the whole story, and the lifecycle ends with a traditional audit. Because verifying what the administrators do with their privileges is just as important as the other steps. Admittedly, some organizations have as large a cultural issue with granular user monitoring because they actually want to trust their employees. Silly organizations, right? But in…
So far we have described the Restrict Access and Protect Credentials aspects of the Privileged User Lifecycle. So far any administrator managing a device is authorized to be there and uses strong credentials. But what happens when they get there? Do they get free reign? Should you just give them root or full Administrator rights and have done with it? What could possibly go wrong with that?
Rich here…
Normally I like to open the Summary with a bit of something from my personal life. Some sort of anecdote with a message. In other words, I blatantly ripped off Mike’s format for the Security Incite… long before he took over half the company. (With Mike, even a partnership can probably be defined as a hostile takeover, based solely on his gruff voice and honesty of opinion).
As we discussed in the Vulnerability Management Evolution introduction, traditional vulnerability scanners, focused purely on infrastructure devices, do not provide enough context to help organizations prioritize their efforts. Those traditional scanners are the plumbing of threat management. You don’t appreciate the scanner until your proverbial toilet is overflowing with attackers and you have no idea what are they targeting. We will spend most of this series on the case for transcending…
Flying into Milan to teach the CCSK class on Sunday morning, it really struck me how much we take this technology stuff for granted. The flight was uneventful (though that coach seat on a 9+ hour flight is the suxxor), except for the fact that the in-seat entertainment system didn’t work in our section. Wait. What? You mean you can’t see the movies and TV shows you want, or play the trivia game to pass the time? How barbaric! Glad I brought my iPad, so I enjoyed half the first season of Game…
In the original Understanding and Selecting a Database Activity Monitoring Solution paper we discussed a number of Advanced Features for analysis and enforcement that have since largely become part of the standard feature set for DSP products. We covered monitoring, vulnerability assessment, and blocking, as the minimum feature set required for a Data Security Platform, and we find these in just about every product on the market. Today’s post will cover extensions of those core features,…
Now that we’ve covered the different data security options for iOS it’s time to focus on building a strategy. In many ways figuring out the technology is the easy part of the problem – the problems start when you need to apply that technology in a dynamic business environment, with users who have already made technology choices.
In our last post, on data security for partially-managed devices, I missed one option we need to cover before moving onto fully-managed devices:
So far this series has introduced Database Security Platforms, provided a full definition of DSP, discussed the origins and evolution of DAM to DSP, and described the technical platform architecture. We have covered the basics of a Database Security Platform. It might seem like a short list compared to all the other extended features we will cover later, but these are the most important ares, and the primary reasons to buy these tools.
As we continue our march through the Privileged User Lifecycle, we have provisioned the privileged users and restricted access to only the devices they are authorized to manage. The next risk to address is the keys or credentials of these privileged users (P-Users) falling into the wrong hands. The best access and entitlements security controls fail if someone can impersonate a P-User.