Data is omnipresent and today’s organizations find it particularly challenging to effectively manage the large volumes of data generated, accumulated, and stored in distinct data repositories. IT risk management and operations team do require transparent, and systematic categorization and classification of the data to ensure proper segregation of the data leading to formulation of structured data; this is, which one is confidential, which one needs limited access, which one is redundant.

The challenge arising from unstructured data intensifies when organizations manage their data in large heterogeneous IT environments where there are multiple functional departments and sub-departments. In a typically vast enterprise IT environment, there are dynamic number of end-users, privileged users, and several IT administrators accessing different IT resources every now and then. The data generated after every task performed by individual end-users varies a lot as per their importance.

Allowing large volumes of data in unstructured format leads to compliance issues, breaches, and increased insider attack vector. Hence, the question arises on how to manage and secure the data assets? How can the IT security team stay proactive in governing the data effectively? 

The answer to this problem statement lies in adopting a contextual data-centric security model. We will see how it works but before that, let us discuss the risks of unstructured data.

How do risks emanate from unstructured data? 

It is never an easy task to manage and maintain terabytes or petabytes of enterprise data generated daily. Typically, large, and mid-size organizations operate in several functional departments along with subsidiary departments (occasionally). As a result, all sorts of data are stored in multiple data repositories pertaining to multiple departments. Among them, a large volume of data is highly confidential in nature, many are extremely sensitive, and few become redundant in a period. This complex scenario wherein data repositories are full of unstructured data is unavoidable in a modern heterogeneous IT environment.

The dominant risks of unstructured/ siloed/ redundant data are:

• Lack of awareness of what sort of data is being generated: If employees are not aware of what sort of data could generate from what kind of IT tasks, then there will not be any idea about how it should be managed and controlled to avoid any kind of misuse.
• Absence of visibility on the volume of data exposed to end users: It is a huge risk if the organization lacks knowledge and records about how much data is exposed to the end-users. It indirectly gives an opportunity to malicious insiders to exploit uncontrolled access to the data assets and misuse it.
• Lack of categorization of data based on its sensitivity: Risk of data misuse multiplies sans categorization. Extremely sensitive data, if co-exists with comparatively less important data, then the desired privacy and restriction for the sensitive data assets are not met. It increases the chances of data abuse.
• No mechanisms in place to restrict or grant controlled access to sensitive data: Continuing with the point above, controlled access to the sensitive data is an absolute must to ensure data privacy and data security. Without any secure access control mechanism, the number of unauthorized access multiples and sensitive data is/ are misused.
• Cumulation of stale/redundant data leading to increased attack surface, IT inefficiencies and compliance issues: Accumulation of redundant data is unavoidable in any organization. However, if it is abundant, then the attack surface expands, and chances of data misuse multiplies. Moreover, it leads to ambiguity among the users about the credibility of any specific data assets which results in ineffective IT hours. It could push organizations towards non-compliance issues and penalties as well.

What does ARCON’s Data Intellect do?

ARCON’s Data Intellect is a part of Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) solution. Modern organizations emphasize data-centric security and governance, that strengthens the overall cybersecurity framework. It also helps organizations implement the Zero Trust security policy desired by modern organizations. Data Intellect leverages AI/ML driven context-aware models which enables the discovery, classification, and categorization of large volumes of unstructured enterprise data and helps orchestrate remedial steps to control access to data while improving compliance posture.

ARCON Data Intellect Benefits

Categorization of data: It is highly imperative for organizations to ensure comprehensive visibility on the ‘type’ of data and the ‘purpose’ of data generated. With this functionality, the data management team can capture what form of data is accumulated in the drives/ repositories such as MS excel, MS word, MS PPT, PDF, JPG etc. Moreover, with categorization, organizations can record and identify what amount of data is related to finance, what amount is related to IT, what amount is legal and so on. It is crucial from a security perspective, especially data-centric security. After all, data-centric security builds contextual security models by integrating the context of data and user. 

Classification of data: With this functionality, the data management and IT security team can analyze and segregate data patterns. For example, what percentage of enterprise data is “confidential,” what amount of data is “sensitive,” which data should be “restricted,” which should be “public,” and which one is redundant. As a result, the organizations can get a comprehensive understanding of what percentage of data is vulnerable to threats and what percentage is no longer critical. This functionality helps to improve the governance framework as well as data management in every repository. 

Orchestration of data access: Since Data Intellect is integrated with ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) solution, it enforces robust access control mechanism around enterprise data that is ‘confidential,’ ‘sensitive’ and ‘vulnerable’ to threats and misuse. Hence, orchestration of data management and data security is established with Data intellect. Moreover, it enables organizations to comply with regulatory mandates and IT standards that demand restricted access to enterprise data for maintaining confidentiality and data integrity. 

Conclusion

Contextual data-centric security has become one of the indispensable security practices for modern organizations. Comprehensive governance of enterprise data is the only way for IT security teams to eliminate data misuse and address IT risks. ARCON’s AI/ML leveraged context-aware model helps organizations to detect, classify and categorize data to improve security and build strong regulatory compliance posture.

Earlier this year, the Government of India announced 16th January, 2022 as “National Startup Day”. Perceived as the backbone of India, the startup ecosystem is envisioned to foster innovation, and strengthen the digital infrastructure along with an overall growth of the nation. 

This is an exciting time for startups and an excellent initiative as well. However, as an Information Security proponent, we would like to bring the area of Information Security at the forefront of this initiative. As modern startups build businesses on the foundation of digital technologies, robust infrastructure is essential to thwart looming IT threats.

Information Security goes hand in hand with startup initiatives

In a typical startup, IT security measures and concerns generally take a back seat. With so many parameters such as registrations, legal permissions, investment, suppliers, logistics, pricing among other areas dominating the list of priorities, Information Security policies typically take a backseat. This happens due to the prevailing misconception that Information Security is a problem for large organizations with a large and distributed environment. 

There are numerous inherent risks associated with the IT security loopholes of the startups. 

• Startups are targeted directly by the malefactors to penetrate bigger targets via mutually shared and accessible databases
• To ensure operational efficiency from the beginning, start-ups deploy advanced technologies without considering adequate IT security measures
• There might not be any dedicated IT team in a startup – even if they have, the number of resources might not be sufficient; as a result, cyber incident response is comparatively slower

How to ensure IT security?

India, in the recent past, is witnessing a massive surge in adopting advanced and sophisticated technologies, thanks to the “Digital India” drive. However, can we claim this initiative revolutionary unless there is adequate cyber resilience? It is mandatory irrespective of small startups or large organizations.

As the confidential business data is migrated to one or more multiple digital platforms separately, it starts challenging the IT security preparedness of the startup. The organizations need to adapt to the trends from the very beginning of this transition. Extensive dissemination of Information Security awareness among the startups cannot just ensure cyber resilience but also comply with the regulatory standards. Compliance rules are applicable to every organization. Even the smallest startups might have access to a huge customer database that could fall under global/ regional regulatory standards. 

Identity and access control vulnerabilities lead to data breaches. With any stringent IT security policy, a single data breach incident might halt the startup even before it takes off. It could even damage brand value before creation. In this scenario, a robust identity and access management practice is highly imperative to ensure secured IT administration. Related solutions secures every access to data resources in the IT environment. 

Conclusion

India is eyeing to fulfill its dream of becoming a leading startup destination globally. While there is dedicated support from the Government, the IT security policies, once implemented, could ensure reliable and handsome investment from all over the world. In the next couple of years, India is expecting the best contribution in GDP from the startups. To materialize that dream, adoption of robust IT security policies and adequate awareness to follow those policies is a must. Without it, the emerging IT threat patterns might play spoilsport.

This shift, however, has led to a gradual expansion of the IT infrastructure. There are a greater number of devices, OSes, end-users, software applications, data hosting platforms that exist now in a typical IT set-up.

Subsequently, an IT infrastructure transforms into a multi-layered structure, comprising of many IT elements — both on-cloud and on-premises, resulting in an increased number of privileged identities – holding access keys to highly classified and sensitive data.

So, what does Privileged Mean?

The ability to manage and control critical IT functional areas is called Privileged in IT terminology. A user with administrative capabilities will have complete or near-complete authority over the system.

Resultantly, securing these critical IT assets become increasingly important amid increasing cyber-attacks from compromised insiders and malicious third-parties.

However, organizations have always struggled to establish control over too many identities, especially the privileged identities, a problem that has caused large data breaches. One of the reasons is that a Privileged Identity Management or Privileged Access Management is a complex task without an automated PAM solution.

Complex privilege identity management is often a deterrent for a security team to provide access to multidimensional teams which results in excessive privilege assignments.

So, what exactly means “too much privileges” or “over-privileged identity”?

These are identities that have far more privileges than are required to carry out the tasks that have been given to them. An obvious example of an over-privileged identity is a user login account that only needs access to the local file system but contains PC or network admin permissions. Excessive Privileges can include the capacity to successfully modify or even eliminate crucial portions of the infrastructure itself. 

Likewise, a cloud-based user that has been given unnecessary privileges can have very dangerous IT consequences.

But what makes managing privileged identities so challenging?

A combination of cumulative “privilege tasks” for individual privileged accounts, increase in the number of privileged identities, and lack of appropriate record-keeping (segregation of privileged users based on roles and responsibilities) typically results in too many privileges. erotic massage body rub nyc near me

Risks arising from excessive privileged entitlements?

• No control over shared user access across enterprise
• Excessive privilege assignment for least critical activities
• No control over activities of third-party staff

Segregating & Securing Privileged Identities

Maintaining all assets in a single pool for a large organization might be risky. The Privileged users & processes must be segregated based on trust, role, and permission sets to enforce role and rule-based access to systems. 

A PAM solution aids in the creation of flexible privilege policies that allow security controls to be implemented based on privileged users’ roles and responsibilities. Segregating privileged entitlements also prevents breaches from spreading as privileged users are granularly controlled.

How Segregating Identities helps to strengthen security

As end-users access systems, the logged data enables the IT staff to understand the IT resources’ usage/access patterns. This in turn helps them to map an outline of various access requirements, and subsequently, once the entitlements are segregated, access policies can be formulated based on “need-to-now” and “need-to-do” principle.

Conclusion

Essentially, to prevent credentials abuse and data breach, organizations must do a comprehensive mapping of their IT environment. It helps to understand the daily use-cases that require to access critical IT resources. Once privileged entitlements are segregated, the IT security staff can enforce granular level access controls. It improves the security posture and helps to comply with the IT standards and regulations as well.

Predictive and proactive IT security approaches have been adopted by cybersecurity pros in recent years. However, the pandemic and its subsequent consequences altered the IT landscape drastically. 

The Covid-19 pandemic is being reined in, but it is happening very slowly, and the impact it has created on the IT security landscape is seemingly long-lasting. 2021 is almost ready to bid adieu where breaches and ransomware attacks among other attacks increased significantly and 2022; will it be any different from a security perspective?

The drastic and frequent changes in the work environment have given sleepless nights to cybersecurity pros around the year. Too many alterations of IT security policies, unpredictable IT security budget, managing partial workforce remotely, everything has increased challenges. 

Forecasts  2022

Information Security and IT risk management have become a board-level concern for both SMEs and large organizations. The number of security breaches is rising uncontrollably, putting cybersecurity at the forefront of business decisions. 

The last three quarters witnessed several incidents of data breaches, malicious IT activities and abuses of credentials even in those industries where there were no apparent cyber threats. According to Forbes, more than 78% organizations claimed that the threat pattern has completely changed in the last two quarters, and it is worsening day by day.

So what are we expecting in 2022? After rigorous R&Ds, the global organizations are adopting more stringent governance standards, advanced security solutions and IT policies to combat more complex cyber threats. ARCON, being a thought leader in the next-gen IT security solutions, discusses forecast 2022 that will shape the future of cybersecurity. 

A] Hybrid Environment / Work From Anywhere (WFA): Since the last couple of months WFA has topped the trend. While many organizations have adopted this practice, others are in the process of adopting it. According to the latest CNBC research, over 70% of global employees are presently working remotely at least once a week. Thus, organizations are modifying their IT infrastructure so that flexibility of location cannot create any hindrance among the workforce. 

Now, what are the security challenges that organizations might face? Frankly, the list is quite long. Let’s discuss the major ones. The organizations jump into a double-faced IT security policies with stringencies in both remote and on-prem work conditions. As a result, the risk assessment teams are also considering both environments to regularize their routine risk assessment and vigilance tasks. At the infrastructure level, organizations need to work on access control policies where there has to be a rule and role-based access to the critical systems and applications. Moreover, the end-user authentication has to be very robust to evade malicious actors in the network periphery. The chances of malefactors could be higher as many organizations are banking on third-party service providers to ensure that there is no interruption in the business.

B]  Healthcare Industry to continue investing heavily in IT security: The healthcare industry consisting of both government organizations and private entities accumulate details of thousands of patients on a daily basis. The situation after the global pandemic has become more intense from a data security perspective. 

As more citizens are facing the biological hazard, they are appearing in the hospitals for medical assistance. Hence, more patients’ data are generated and stored in applications and databases. This poses a huge risk. Cyber criminals consider the healthcare industry a treasure trove to manipulate and misuse the personal identifiable information. The year 2022 is going to observe higher risks, and every healthcare organization needs to have frequent vulnerability assessments to mitigate cyber risks. According to Forrester, the healthcare industry’s investment in cybersecurity is expected to rise to a total of $125 billion between 2021 to 2025. 

C] More demand for Endpoint Security solutions: The usage of endpoints like desktops, laptops or external hard drives has increased exponentially. Simultaneously, the number of risk patterns have risen beyond control and measure. Access Control risks are increasing due to Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) and Work From Anywhere (WFA) practices. 

Since vulnerability in endpoints is one of the biggest sources of data abuse, adoption of best practices in endpoint security and management is an absolute must. 

Organizations following WFA practices are the most vulnerable to endpoint attacks. The applications that are not aligned with the role and rule-based access policies, including applications with ‘always-on’ privileges may witness the highest chances of anomalous activities. In addition, behaviour analytics around identities and scoring end-user profiles based on risks will be on the rise as businesses and organizations look to mitigate IT frauds and insider threats. 

D] Higher requirement of Cloud Security: For the IT operational convenience and scalability, and to survive in the race of digital advancement, global organizations are adopting the cloud-based IT infrastructure. Cloud computing offers a host of services that fastens the IT innovation along with the development of services and applications. 

Nevertheless, cloud environments always bear higher security risks arising from poor access controls to cloud resources. Absence of user authentication mechanism could be catastrophic when there are multiple privileged identities in the IT environment. Privileged access is one of the most vulnerable areas as organizations with distributed and shared identities access cloud resources. 

Hence, ARCON believes that Identity and Access Control technologies along with Privileged Access Management will continue to be adopted by global organizations. Security pros will not only focus on scalability of solutions but will also look to have comprehensive capabilities in the solutions. Robust authorization and authentication, identity federation, SSO, digital vaults for password randomization, granular controls, privileged access on-demand are some of the critical security features that will witness an accelerated adoption. 

E]  Compliance: Data security and privacy are two of the most important components in any IT standard and regulatory compliance. And as more and more organizations continue to adopt managed service providers, cloud computing and private clouds, security pros will have to bear more responsibility towards compliance. 

Not only that, corporate data flowing within organization’s different data centers located in different geographies will require utmost security and confidentiality. Although most IT security standards and regulations cover all aspects of data security and integrity, some central banks and regional authorities have certain additional requirements. Therefore, organizations have to be vigilant, audit-ready and stay compliant to various standards.  яндекс

Due to increasing stringency in the compliance landscape, organizations that have strong IT governance, conduct regular IT audits and follow the mandates by default will be positioned to keep non-compliance penalties at bay. Whether a MNC or SME, 2022 is expected to foster hair-split analysis of the compliance mandates.

Conclusion

Every industry in the post-pandemic era is observing drastic changes in the IT security environment. As we welcome 2022, the above forecasts give a strong indication that adequate security measures are ‘must’ for every MNC and SME. Organizations will have to realign their overall cybersecurity posture in the changing times. Stay safe and secure with ARCON! Happy 2022!

Ever come across the humour of technology competition—who’s big? The joke goes this way: a social media giant claims the credit of evolving the whole of mankind by connecting the netizens; then an email comes forward and asks, ‘if I’d not have been there, would you exist?’ The next moment the internet comes forward and says what is your role without me? Finally, electricity comes into the scene, pins everyone down and utters nothing – everything is understood!

Truly speaking, electricity builds the foundation of every technological advancement. The entire world is facing immense demand for more power and energy every day. The energy consumption rate is growing upto 2% globally per year. It is the fastest growing energy among the rest. To ensure uninterrupted energy supply, nations depend on their own natural sources like bio-fuels to meet their needs. Sometimes the resources are imported with the help of Government initiatives. Therefore, it is obvious for utilities to be in good financial shape and the critical infrastructure – be it of power supplies, water management systems or any other essential services – should be secure from any untoward IT incident. 

Why Critical Infrastructure (Utilities) is targeted?

Digitalization has forced power houses, nuclear plants, oil & gas organizations and coal mines to adopt new technologies like ICS (Industrial Control System), RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Data Analytics and even cloud computing. For this, there is a huge expansion (both Geographical & Internal) of IT infrastructure to manage the immense workload. 

A large number of privileged accounts with elevated rights to mission critical systems are provisioned to access the same. There are numerous segregations of operational roles in the energy and utility industry, and hence privileged rights are required to manage and monitor the tasks seamlessly. Quite often the IT team creates new identities on an adhoc basis, but eventually, the overall vigilance of those Ids and their activities goes casual. It creates unnecessary chaos in the network, results in insecure access controls, and thereby invites chances of system/ data exploitation. Today cyber crooks are finding this industry as a ‘new goldmine’ of critical information. This industry has turned cyber vulnerable due to several reasons.

• Frequent adoption of advanced technologies to speed up productivity without adequate privileged access controls 
• Inadequate mechanisms to assess and fix IT security vulnerabilities
• No robust solution to secure critical infrastructure 
• Absence of continuous monitoring of the IT operations or supply chain
• Non-compliance loopholes
• Gradual increase of insider threats
• Poor awareness programs and Zero maintenance of security culture

If any utility faces any cyber incident, there are long-term consequences.

• Long unwanted Disruption in the production
• Chances of Critical Information loss
• Huge (some immeasurable) financial losses
• Face the wrath of legal formalities
• Compliance Penalties
• Malign of goodwill
• Additional cost of rearranging IT infrastructure

What could be done?

Cyber-attacks are not just costly but also big blows to the nation’s economy. And for power and utilities, it affects the lives of millions of people. There is no better option for energy and utility firms but to abide by the stringent regulatory mandates without hampering their day-to-day business operations. 

Specifically, the access control mechanism should be robust. Insiders, compromised third-party end-users and sophisticated cyber-criminals typically target privileged accounts. They snoop on privileged credentials. Once they acquire it, they hijack privileged accounts. In the past there have been many incidents where organized cyber-criminals disrupted power supplies and water management systems. Vulnerable access controls in most cases encourage cyber-criminals. 

A robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution such as ARCON | PAM provides necessary safeguards to protect and secure privileged access and credentials. The solution offers a centralized engine to govern privileged users where role and rule-based authorization policy, controls and monitors privileged users inside the network. And any suspicious privileged session is detected in real-time to ensure proactive security. 

Let us see how ARCON | PAM can address the Utilities’ challenges mentioned above:

1. Role and rule-base access to the privileged accounts is a must in energy & utilities. It will not just manage and monitor the users as per their profiles but also avoid unprecedented threats coming from malicious insiders. If the critical systems of the production and operational units are accessed without role and rule-based privileges, then it might wreak havoc. A single cyber incident can put the entire production into a standstill. ARCON | PAM’s robust access control mechanism identifies unauthorized access in the network and prevents it from obtaining critical access.
2. ARCON | PAM offers just-in-time privilege elevation, which helps to revoke standing privileges after the task is over. Moreover, it becomes easy for the IT team to ensure security with limited access to critical systems or applications. As a result, it nullifies the chances of successful unauthorized access in the network. 
3. ARCON | PAM frequently randomizes all critical privileged credentials and helps to store them safely in the Password Vault. In this age of automation, most of the organizations avoid manual control of passwords and search for automated password management. ARCON’s PAM solution provides a digital password vault, adaptive authentication and dashboard for complete IT governance. It assists the IT risk management team to continuously check and assess the vulnerable areas in the privileged access environment. 
4. Staying compliant to the international regulatory standards is very crucial for the utility industry. Today most (if not all) of the organizations seek and verify compliance before any kind of business collaboration. While any Government remains sceptical about their GDP, energy and utilities play a pivotal role in improving the economic standards of any nation. ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) helps organizations to follow the mandates by default and avoid any non-compliance penalties. It gives a message of assurance and service reliability. 
5.  ARCON | PAM offers workflow management that enables the IT security and compliance management to streamline the access approval process across the privileged access environment. With the help of predefined IT policies, organizations can enhance their IT administrative and operational efficiency.

Conclusion

Today, critical infrastructure is facing enormous cyber threats. Access controls, especially privileged access control must be robust. With 15 years of experience and expertise in securing the critical infrastructure of large utility companies across the globe, ARCON | PAM helps the IT teams to reinforce control mechanisms to ensure security, reliability, and productivity.

How much time does it take to place an online order for your lunch or dinner? 1 minute or maybe a few seconds more! Statistics show that in a single hour 90 cyber hacks and data breaches are happening across the globe. It means that by the time we order our lunch, a security breach occurs!

The IT security patterns have evolved a lot since remote work conditions became effective. Furthermore, while we gear up for the back-to-office, the cyber threat patterns are also changing drastically. Generally, enterprises understand and emphasize the common and most-discussed IT security threats. However, some threat areas prevail within the IT infrastructure that we tend to overlook quite often. 

Here are some top threats that we need to keep in mind to ensure information security.

• Data Mobilization 

If organizations lack stringent data security policies, then the growing mobilization of data leaves them vulnerable to breaches. Undereducated or lackadaisical employees could unknowingly leak the most confidential business data to the malefactors.

Risks aggravate if adequate configuration management is not done to ensure that end-users store data in the right place. If it is a cloud environment, the risk is even more as organized hacking groups are more expert at exploiting access control vulnerabilities. Not only corporate data is at risk, business-critical applications and corporate social media accounts, every data is flowing uncontrollably. In this backdrop, if corporate and business-critical data is not segregated properly, especially in WFH conditions, then a single breach could be catastrophic. 

• Cyber Espionage

This hi-tech spying started way back in the late twentieth century. Even a couple of years ago, a 12-year cyber-espionage was discovered where hackers were eavesdropping on different government agencies and firms of other nations to sabotage their regular IT operations for an indefinite period.

To delve deeper into the concern, even today, enterprises are quite oblivious to the spying of confidential business secrets. Large corporations and government organizations are prime victims of cyber espionage, majorly done by rivals. The information stolen through spear phishing or malvertising are sold to some higher bidder or to the dark web. If cyber espionage is not taken seriously on time, it can put business processes and progress at stake.

• Poor Data Encryption

Data breaches are costly if organizations fail to deploy standard encryption tools. Most of the organizations have mastered data encryption in transit but are unable to secure it at rest. This leaves data vulnerable and lowers the restrictions for cybercriminals to pack a punch. It is seen that organizations store encryption keys on the same system where data is stored. It is indirectly keeping the keys just beside the lock. Open access to data by end-users of different roles means IT security is ‘always unlocked’!

• Updates of Security Patches

Cyber attackers obtain illegal access to the enterprise IT infrastructure because of IT loopholes. Unpatched software is the easiest and most frequented entry door to critical systems. Organizations with information security solutions always identify the patches that are not updated and act immediately. Not updating security patches is an open invitation for the cyber criminals to use the loopholes and abuse data.

• Asset Management

Without a complete inventory of IT assets, it is never possible for any organization to keep a track of unmanaged and unprotected systems/ networks. If an organization is not aware of a system which is left unsecured, then security breaches are inevitable. The essence of asset management tools is for tracking and assessing software and hardware components to protect the IT environment from possible IT security threats.

Conclusion

Security is actually a peoples’ problem, not a technology problem. The majority of breach incidents are enforced by an undereducated employee who makes security mistakes while performing their routine tasks. These hack incidents could have surely been avoided if they were trained properly. Many times, employees share their credentials with their colleagues or managers when they are out of the office, so that any urgent assignment is not kept on hold.

In every circumstance, organizations need to have defined security policies to ensure accountability from the employees as they are the first line of defense. They should be equipped with relevant security awareness so that they can identify any suspicious activity and take preventive steps before the breach occurs.