To prevent cyberattacks, many small-scale organizations are using an identity and access management tool on their infrastructure. It, in turn, helps them in finding any suspicious behavior on their network right away.

Nonetheless, using only a single tool is not going to help you out in this aspect. Besides, you will also need to know about cyber-attack-related trends as well. Here, we are going to talk about ten such facts to keep you on the radar.

1) Cybercrime is Extremely Profitable

A cyberattack can affect an organization in several ways. It can affect the network, security system, and overall infrastructure of a company massively. Besides, if the attacker has stolen even a small amount of classified data, the corporation has to pay them.

According to an IBM report, the average cost of a data breach can be around USD 3.9 million. Moreover, in the case of stolen data, the business will also have to pay almost USD 150/data.

Thus, if you want to avoid such a calamity, then be sure to integrate an access management system in your infrastructure.

2) Phishing E-mails are More Common Than You Know

The usage of phishing e-mails became extremely popular during the year 2018, and it has been prominent in 2020 as well. According to a report, around one person out of three tends to open a phishing mail. However, most people usually avoid clicking on the malicious link in the email. Only 12% of individuals become the victim of an actual phishing attack.

3) Cyberattacks are More Common Among the Millennial

According to a report, the millennial are more commonly affected by the cyberattacks. As they are technologically savvier, they tend to be more casual regarding their smartphone or PC’s security system. As per reports, almost 53% of millennials have encountered the issue of cybercrime in 2019.

4) Cybercrime is More Common in Indonesia

Amongst others, the small country of Indonesia had experienced the highest number of cyberattacks in 2018. Around 59% of the nation’s population was affected by this global issue massively. Pasiekite viršūnes su SEO paslaugomis SeoPaslaugos.com

Hence, if you belong to Indonesia and want to keep your company’s data well-secured, employing UBA becomes imperative. Also known as User Behavior Analytics, this tool can help you monitor and evaluate your end-users’ profiles.

This way, it becomes easier for you to find out the culprit even before cybercrime gets committed.

5) The Prominence of Data Breach

According to Accenture, around 130 data breaches occur amongst the prominent organizations in the world annually. The number of the same also gets increased by almost 27%, which sounds even more alarming.

6) Financially Interested Attacks are More Prevalent

Almost 1 billion of data was exposed in the year 2019 through breaches. Among them, only 25% were constituted through spying on the network system of the organization. But, around 71% of attacks were done purely based on financial acquirement.

7) Hacking Issues Occur More Frequently than Other Forms of Cyberattacks

Among the data breaches that occurred in 2019, almost 52% of them were done by hacking. On the other hand, around 32%-33% of attacks were employed through social engineering and phishing. Lastly, the remaining ones were made through the deployment of malware.

8) The Malicious File Extensions Hide in the Plain Sight

The commonly-used applications, such as MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, consist of the most malicious extensions. Aside from this, the official website of WordPress, too, is vulnerable to these malware-based tools.

9) The Consumers Despise Data Breach

When getting connected with an organization, most consumers tend to provide their credentials. Thus, in case a data breach occurs, their private information will get hurt as well.

Thus, as per reports, around 71% of people have said that they will leave a company if a data breach occurs on the scene.

Due to this reason, it becomes imperative to integrate PAM (Privileged Access Management) into your system.

With it, you can control all of your privileged or crucial accounts and protect your management system proficiently.

10) Android Platforms are More Vulnerable to Cyberattacks

The android platform usually offers access to almost any program or app available out there. This, in turn, makes it susceptible to cyberattacks. Moreover, as smartphones generally do not feature any integrated security system, it becomes quite difficult for the user to prevent cyber assaults.

Conclusion

All-in-all, the issue of cyberattacks has become quite prominent in the last few years. Thus, it becomes crucial for you to use a proper security system to keep your infrastructure safe and secure.

During the first half of the webinar, Paul Fisher from KuppingerCole highlighted the traditional IT threats associated with privileged accounts in the modern organizations. He also highlighted the IT trends, technologies and future of this solution. Below are the key takeaways from the first half of the session:

• The traditional IT threats associated with privileged accounts are due to unmonitored and unrestricted access, lack of user authorization and user authentication, uncontrolled access to the database servers, weak privileged credentials, poor privileged lifecycle management, and lack of accountability. He also added that global security compliances like EU GDPR, California Privacy Act, SWIFT CSCF and their implementation prevent losses of digital assets, money and reputation.
• Adoption of several business processes are demanding more robustness of PAM solutions. Due to the drastic transformation of the work environment, organizations are counting too much on remote access, unlimited vendor access, uninterrupted customer access, data governance etc. However, security of the admin accounts and the privileged accounts remains at stake if the access control mechanisms are unable to detect and identify anomalous behaviour.
• To beef up IT security in the enterprise network of Privileged Access Management (PAM), organizations are emphasizing more on seamless monitoring of the privileged sessions, multi-factor authentication of the users, single sign-on and incorporating Zero Trust Privileged Access Security framework. Assessment of risk is given more crucial to reinforce end-to-end security in the overall IT ecosystem.
• Incident response management, forensics, endpoint protection, secure remote access and IT risk management are the security processes that organizations are following today to keep emerging IT threats at bay.
• Today privileged accounts are no more accessed only by the administrators but also by IT users in different levels of IT operations. The expansion of network, geography and the number of privileged accounts are forcing IT security teams for better management of passwords. To ensure ease of operations, the organizations keep on piling up privileged rights without keeping a track of the passwords which leads to disaster.
• The proliferation of high value data and services suggest more number of privilege accounts in modern organizations. Assessment of risk and continuous analysis of the importance of the accounts is most important to ensure secure IT infrastructure. Systematic allocation of roles and responsibilities can help organizations to track who is accessing which account at what time for what purpose. This enhances the agility and effectiveness of PAM solutions.
• The high value privilege accounts require immediate shift towards Just-In-Time privilege so that excessive standing privileges can be removed from the enterprise network. The administrators can keep a track of the privileged rights easily since the permit is temporary and requirement-based.

In the later half of the webinar Anil Bhandari from ARCON discussed the advanced use cases of Privileged Access Management (PAM) and how ARCON can help to meet the requirements to eventually move towards a successful PAM implementation. Here are the highlights of the discussion:

• Considering the general use cases of PAM today, the first and foremost point that most of the organizations prefer is to implement password-less access with all the target devices where the users can seamlessly connect with the VPNs, RDPs etc. Secondly, organizations look forward to implementing command filtering features which are necessary in scenarios where commands are given to wrong targets. PAM helps to filter the relevant firing of commands with a strong control over the access mechanism.
• Session monitoring is not only important from a security perspective but also it helps the admin team to rectify any mistakes in any of the sessions done by any user by finding out the time and location of the task. For example, if any third party vendor who is supposed to shoot a command to the production team, by mistake shoots it to the procurement team, session monitoring can help to identify the wrong command and terminate it immediately.
• In spite of having all the above mechanisms in place, organizations still struggle with a Password rotation policy especially in the mid-size and large organizations. The prevalent reasons behind it are a large number of IT assets, huge investments in new technologies without assessing the IT environment, inability to meet the needs of authorizing and authenticating users, understanding highly complex IT infrastructure, explosion of privileged IDs without any least privilege principle and so on. ARCON | PAM necessitates all the requirements under one roof.
• Since a decade, ARCON understands and emphasizes the requirement of a strong vault that can be far from attack and no data asset is lost. In addition, hundreds and thousands of passwords can be rotated in minutes with ARCON | PAM’s password vault. It has the technology of Multi-vault processors that can be aligned to the IT infrastructure on the basis of devices, user groups or lines of businesses.
• The technologies that PAM platform safeguards are enterprise OS, security devices, routing devices, telecom equipment, business applications, cloud applications, operational technologies, robotics, and IoT. ARCON | PAM helps organizations with an overall time management because no organization would like to spend an army of employees to manage PAM solutions, instead, it should be user-friendly and a self-learning experience.
• ARCON plays the role of an identity provider in an enterprise by managing the PAM lifecycle and offering a strong vault. It protects the data assets with a smart session monitoring, command filtering, and offers analytical reports on screen from which the risk assessment team can capture any kind of suspicious activity. It even directs the administrator to the right video at the right time which saves lots of time while checking all the user activity videos hours after hours.
• ARCON with its highly skilled professional services team can help organizations achieve the advanced use cases without any disruptions. Large enterprises have embarked on the journey to address the emerging threats across the globe and ARCON solutions are there to safeguard the organizations from those threats.
• ARCON is even ready for some advanced use cases. In the next 2 years, BOTs are likely to come up with a huge space. Our personal tasks could be even automated and credentials would start being hard-coded. PAM again here could play a big role to secure and automate password rotation policies.
• Lastly, Zero Trust Security model is going to be mainstream now where users can access the technologies from anywhere in the world. It requires uninterrupted assessment of the tasks done by the IT users. ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) is always a step ahead with the robustness of risk-predictive mechanisms compared to the risk-preventive ones. The Predict | Protect | Prevent model of ARCON enables us to build a Zero Trust framework around privileged identities.

ARCON in this cutting-edge technology domain is always ahead in the competition as the R&D team always remains at par with the demands and trends. ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) in this era of remote work conditions addresses humongous access control risks arising from daily use cases. ARCON sincerely looks forward to be a part of more webinars with KuppingerCole Analysts and explore more avenues of privileged security that can be reinforced in the new-age technologies of the next decade.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

Why Segmentation is must today
Today modern enterprises are adopting digital means for every bit of function and operations. They want to automate processes and make the IT ecosystem agile. However, in the process of digitalization, there is a proliferation of privileged identities. As a result, managing whole set identities becomes extremely challenging for an IT administrator unless there is a proper segmentation of the network and the privileged identities. This rule and role-based policy help the organization to define the tasks and remove any kind of ambiguity regarding who is doing what with an underlying set of digital identities. To know more in details, you can refer to our exclusive Newsletter on Zero Trust Privileged Access Security redefined by ARCON | PAM.

Benefits of Segmenting Identities

• Overall systematic IT infra and datacenter approach: Any enterprise always looks for a systematic approach within its IT infrastructure and datacenters. Best Privileged practices such as segmentation of identities make the administrators’ job easier as it enables seamless monitoring of the user activities. It helps in defining and segregating the set of privileged accounts (users/ user groups, services, service groups) that are meant for different target devices or systems.
• Protecting the endpoints: Unprotected endpoints are the major entry doors for malicious actors to gain illegal access to critical systems and steal confidential information. Therefore it is highly advisable to maintain the segmentation of the network at the endpoint level to avoid any kind of unauthorized access. ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management ensures endpoint security by segmenting users based on their roles and responsibilities.
• Special focus on user role & responsibilities: The privileged users in an enterprise environment should have a segmented workstation to access privileged accounts in the network. When the roles and responsibilities of these privileged identities found in different workstations are pre-defined, it helps the administrators to monitor, control and manage the activities. The IT security staff can identify and remove any suspicious activity happening in the network periphery in real-time.

The Bottom Line:
Nowadays, large and mid-scale organizations across the globe are adopting the Zero Trust Privileged Access Security Framework to strengthen IT security infrastructure. Segmentation of the privileged identities which ensures “least privilege principle”, is the first step towards achieving the Zero Trust Security model.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

Today, organizations are managing their IT infrastructure with an increased number of challenges. They have to monitor too many privileged accounts in the vast IT network and manage the security of a huge stream of data. Thus, organizations find Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as better alternatives to handle this massive task of ensuring enterprise IT administration efficiently. Hence the demand for Managed Service Providers has shot up significantly in recent times.

Typically, organizations decide to migrate IT operations to the MSP environment to ensure business continuity with better management of data and when they have less manpower to manage the IT processes and tasks. However, MSP is a third party environment and if the vendor pays scant attention to the IT security posture, then organizations might fall prey to unexpected data breach threats.

In the recent past, the pattern of cyber threats is witnessing a high level of sophistication, which is driving organizations to re-architect their security posture into a Zero Trust security framework. ‘Zero Trust’ in the MSP environment is “most-required” because this is more of a data-centric security approach rather than just a conventional IT security approach which focuses only on network security. It helps the organization to refrain from assuming the trustworthiness of the user, rather it analyzes the behavioural risks of the user from information gathered.

Security Preparedness

The major security challenge, while managing data in the MSP environment lies with the uncontrolled and unmonitored access to privileged accounts. Since organizations are bound to share the privileged account details and confidential information with the third-party, the entire infrastructure becomes vulnerable to unauthorized access.

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a comprehensive solution that reinforces the data security in MSP environment. Deploying PAM helps in maintaining a unified policy engine through which all the privileged activities are routed through. It keeps a vigilant eye on the privileged users in the MSP environment by governing all privileged activities through rule and role-based policies. Besides, it provides the deepest form of granular level control to control and restrict unauthorized users in the network. Robust password vaulting helps the administrator to change and randomize the privileged passwords frequently in a highly secured electronic vault. Above all, ARCON | PAM’s AI and ML capabilities elevate the level of security much higher and deeper.

To sum up, ARCON | PAM offers these benefits to maintain data security in MSP environment:

• Centralized administration of all privileged activities
• Session recording and threat analysis on the dashboard
• Single sign-on access to all underlying devices and ensures administrative efficiency
• Granular level control that restricts and elevates commands to control critical activities on target devices
• Mitigation of threats arising from unauthorized access in critical systems with multi-factor authentication which includes adaptive authentication
• Monitoring of every privileged session with detection and suspension of suspicious privileged sessions with real-time alerts
• Comprehensive reports for all privileged sessions to fulfill audit and regulatory requirements via Audit Trails
• Frequent rotation of privileged access credentials of all privileged users

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.