According to a 2024 report from Verizon, close to 40% of all data breaches involve mismanagement of privileged identities. As attacks become more sophisticated, it's essential for enterprises to go beyond conventional identity security practices and adopt new measures and practices, namely identity threat detection and response (ITDR). ITDR is a security discipline that places paramount importance on the need to protect the integrity of privileged identities and to formulate a proactive strategy in response to identity threats. To perfect your ITDR strategy, it is important to get foundational preventive controls—such as PAM solutions—in place.
For any ITDR strategy to be effective, foundational threat prevention mechanisms are required. Preventive measures limit identity threats and contain exposure, enabling enterprises to maximize the benefits of ITDR.
Effective PAM solutions like ManageEngine PAM360 play an integral role in threat prevention by defining restrictive policies that limit privileged access and eliminate excess privileges from users.
When privileged access is granted without moderation, it leads to privilege creep. PAM360's powerful just-in-time capabilities let admins provision temporary, elevated access for users. Users will own least privileged access at all times, and will only gain elevated access on demand, thereby eliminating privilege creep.
Admins can further scrutinize users' access by enforcing command and application controls. PAM360's command control prevents users from running commands that haven't been pre-approved. Similarly, application control ensures that users gain access to just a specific application and not the entire server or resource.
Access scrutinization is an effective process if access privileges are evaluated iteratively. PAM360's native Zero Trust capabilities can profile users and IT resources and moderate user access based on the unique, real-time trust scores of users and devices.
It's important to delineate access permissions for privileged identities by establishing role-based restrictions. PAM360 provides six different default roles and custom roles, each of which can restrict user access based on their job roles.
An ITDR strategy's core theme is to improve cybersecurity preparedness when the basic preventive controls fail, compromising the identity infrastructure. A solution like PAM360 not only solidifies the prevention mechanism, but also blends with the detection and response layer of ITDR, equipping admins with key insights and action triggers.
Access scrutinization can only be an effective process if privileged access is evaluated iteratively. PAM360's native Zero Trust capabilities can profile users and IT resources for anomalies, generate trust scores for each user and device, and moderate user access in real time using the generated scores. This includes automated session termination, alerts to administrators, restricted access on endpoints, and more.
To respond effectively to a threat, security admins need logs from all vital identity solutions in the infrastructure, including from a PAM solution. PAM360's real-time, tamper-proof logs deliver clear insights on the critical changes and actions performed by privileged users. These logs can also be forwarded to any security information and event management (SIEM) solution for deep correlation and analysis. In important cases, admins will receive instant notifications when critical sensitive actions are performed.
Solutions that help with SIEM, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), and extended detection and response (XDR) form the integral detection and response layer of an ITDR strategy. PAM360 seamlessly integrates and interacts with such tools to limit threats by identifying and isolating suspicious users and resources, making the preventive layer response-ready.
Before recovering operations, it's essential to perform remediation actions such as password reset and key rotation. PAM360 can reset privileged identities such as passwords and SSH keys in bulk, minimizing downtime and ensuring faster return to operation. PAM360's System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) connectors can also contextually revoke and modify user access across your IAM ecosystem.