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

There are several methods by which malicious agents attack websites and destabilize network services and resources.

One of the most commonly used techniques is the DDoS attack, which stands for distributed denial-of-service.

Through this attack, a website ends up becoming inoperable and overloaded with malicious traffic.

However, DDoS attacks can also be made against all types of network resources, such as virtual applications, data centers, corporate servers, APIs, etc.

Traffic overload can cause a variety of problems for your company, from bottlenecks in accessing important data to the unavailability of all digital tools in the corporation.

As a result, it is important to be aware of these attacks and articulate solutions to protect your company.

There are several ways to prevent DDoS attacks on your enterprise servers. In this text, we will explain in more detail what DDoS attacks are and how they can affect your business.

And, above all, how to prevent DDoS attacks in your company.

What Are DDoS Attacks?

Before specifying what DDoS attacks are, we must understand what DoS (denial-of-service) attacks are in general.

A DoS attack is a way of rendering a network resource unusable. The attack is usually carried out with a traffic overload, directing a series of superfluous requests to render the website unusable.

Through these malicious requests, the system ends up being overloaded and unable to process legitimate requests.

In the DDoS attack, the traffic maliciously directed to the resource comes from several sources. By multiplying the source of the attack, the method makes it impossible to avoid overloading by blocking a single source.

DDoS attacks are often used as a criminal mechanism. By rendering the system unusable, hackers can blackmail large organizations.

There are numerous techniques for performing a DDoS attack.

The simplest way to do a DDoS attack is through a specialized attack tool such as Slowloris or Stacheldraht. This type of tool is included in several types of malware and can perform the attack without the knowledge of the system administrator.

The best way to understand a DDoS attack is through the following metaphor: imagine a group of people crowding into a shop entrance, preventing access to legitimate consumers. In this way, the shop itself ends up being inaccessible.

How can DDoS Attacks Affect Your Business?

DDoS attacks are intended to make legitimate use of websites and web resources in general unavailable. Thus, the attacker is able to disrupt the activity of the attacked organization.

The main targets of these attacks are online services that we use frequently and contain sensitive data, such as internet banking, media, educational tools, medical management systems, e-commerce, etc.

The motivations behind attackers are not the same. Different groups have different reasons for carrying out DDoS attacks.

Attacks are sometimes carried out as a form of political activism. When government agencies are the victims, the agents generally seek to cause some type of economic or social instability.

In the case of massive attacks organized by large groups, DDoS can be used as a distraction tactic, directing the attention of authorities and technical teams to smaller attacks.

In other cases, the motivations may be strictly financial. For example, a malicious competitor could order a DDoS attack to make its service more attractive to consumers.

Or, more directly, the attacker can use the DDoS attack to extort a company and gain illicit profits.

In these cases, the malicious agent produces an attack to disable some digital service and charges a ransom to return the system to normality. These are the attacks known as RDDoS (ransom distributed denial-of-service).

Another tactic is to just threaten the organization with an attack. To convince the company to pay the ransom, the attacker can make an attack demonstration, a “sneak peek”, proving its disruptive capacity and, in this way, increasing their chances of profit from the fear and panic produced.

Unfortunately, the company does not always have an adequate protection system. Furthermore, contacting law enforcement authorities can be a time-consuming solution and cause even more trouble with invaders.

Most of the time, hackers are not even tracked, as they use cryptocurrency wallets to receive the ransom.

There is a whole lot of calculation to be done in the event of ransomware attacks. In fact, the answer to the simple question “should I or should I not pay the ransom?” can be more complicated than you think. See what factors to consider by clicking here.

The consequences of a DDoS attack can be disastrous. The instability of internal systems, for example, can make the production process more expensive or even totally hindered. On the other hand, the unavailability of websites accessed by the public can make it impossible to attract customers and make sales.