Security leaders believe that enterprises can be protected from random account takeovers, ransomware, and common attack tactics and vectors of privilege escalation
Enterprises acknowledge that cyber attacks prove to be expensive both in terms of financial losses and client loyalty risks. Security leaders believe that the security incidents will not subside anytime soon, and will in fact increase further until the necessary measures are taken.
As more organizations transfer their workloads to the cloud, increase automation capacities, and embrace collaboration services to support remote employees, threat actors have continuously updated their tactics to disrupt and exploit business transformation areas.
Maintaining business resiliency and continuity despite the changing threat landscape starts with a perfect understanding of the hackers. Each hacker may have different motivating factors ranging from business disruption to espionage and financial gain. The attack cycle remains constant, however.
Threat actors start with a common tactic like exploiting a popular software liability or phishing to access the network. Once access is gained, they try to exploit privileged accounts, particularly those with powerful and broad administrative access to sensitive data.
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They intend to gain access to maintaining persistence or reconnaissance of the corporate network to prepare for potential attacks. Such attacks don’t cross the nascent stages in the absence of privileged access.
Mitigating privilege escalation
CIOs say that enterprise applications and software to ensure business continuity may be potentially riddled with liabilities and misconfigurations. This is certain to happen if patching and basic upgrades are not done at the appropriate time.
Data breaches are often a result of unpatched vulnerabilities. To hackers, the liability is by itself an open door to gain the advantage of an initial entry. The next step is hackers’ mode to further their foothold their presence by facilitating later movements and escalating privileges across the decentralized and distributed networks.
Security leaders say that privilege escalation is the most vital link in an attack chain. It lets hackers complete several tasks, like building additional back gates, network persistence, and managing critical data and assets access.
An effective and modern privileged access management program deploys the minimum privilege principle that makes sure that only authorized employees to have the permission to perform relevant tasks, and nothing more. It helps to reduce the attack surface significantly by limiting administrator and super-user permissions.
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Prevention of lateral movement
CIOs say that the lateral movement strategy is often used in connection with privilege escalation that intends to let hackers gain access and control systems on the corporate network to spread an infiltration or ensure long-term persistence. Hackers use the method to progress from initial access to more valuable data, business-critical networks, or deploy the attack.
Security leaders say that privileged access management is the most productive method to prevent lateral movement by protecting the access points threat actors use to move within and across the network.
Reducing the speed of ransomware spread
CIOs point out that ransomware has continued to be the most expensive and common cyberattacks. The attack generally starts on an endpoint; the ransomware’s goal is to encrypt systems, files, or applications so that the organization can be held hostage until the desired ransom is settled.
The interconnected businesses prone to ransomware attacks are a real cause of concern for enterprises of all sizes. Privileged access management can easily limit the ransomware’s damaging impact on the network.
