What is privileged access security?

Privileged access security is a set of strategies employed by a company to protect its privileged access accounts from being used as gateways to the company's most sensitive data. Privileged access accounts are either user accounts or application accounts that provide elevated access to the servers that contain the company's most valuable assets.

How common is privileged access compromise?

Close to 80 percent of security breaches involve privileged credentials. Also, privileged accounts don't belong to just a few employees; many applications and processes also need privileged access to function. Moreover, systems may also have a local administrator account with elevated permissions. For every employee in an office, there are around 3-5 times more privileged accounts. A malicious agent has only to break into one of these accounts to be able to move laterally across the network, and access your most important data.

How to strengthen privileged access security

Principle of least privilege: According to this principle, employees of a company should have access to only those applications and files that they need to perform their job. This will ensure that only authorized users have access to your firm's sensitive data.
Audit all the privileged accounts: Identify and audit all privileged accounts, including user, application and service accounts. It will include locating the privileged accounts on the network and auditing their activities for any unusual behavior. This can help to weed out privileged accounts that are no longer used, and also update the security settings of the active accounts.
Follow password security best practices: Implement password security best practices such as routinely changing passwords, never using the same passwords for admin accounts, enforcing password complexity, centrally managing the password settings, and so on.

Privileged access security with ADAudit Plus

ADAudit Plus is an Active Directory auditing tool that can audit and report on AD users and entities such as servers, workstations, files and so on. The reports on user actions such as logons, logoffs and file modifications can help keep your assets secure. Here is a sample report from ADAudit Plus on administrative user actions:

This report provides information on all the modifications performed by administrators, who are users with privileged access. It displays the name, timestamp, the domain name and a description of the modification event. This report can be accessed on ADAudit Plus by navigating to Reports > Account Management > Administrative User Actions.

About ADAudit Plus

ADAudit Plus is a real-time, web-based Windows Active Directory change reporting software that audits, tracks, reports and alerts on Windows (Active Directory, workstations logon/logoff, file servers and servers), NetApp filers and EMC servers and privileged accounts to help meet the demands of the much-needed security, audit and compliance. With ADAudit Plus, track authorized/unauthorized AD management changes, access of users, GPO, groups, computer, OU. Track every file, folder modifications, access and permissions changes with 200+ detailed event-specific reports and get instant emails alerts. You can also export the results to XLS, HTML, PDF and CSV formats to assist in interpretation and computer forensics. For more information on ADAudit Plus, visit https://www.manageengine.com/active-directory-audit/ .

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