As organizations become more tech savvy, employees may be unknowingly engaging in risky actions that open them up to data breaches and other cyberattacks. With 84% of organizations experiencing an identity-related security breach in the last year, it is safe to say this risk-factor requires prioritization, especially as 96% of companies report their breach was preventable with identity-related security measures.
Real-time, adaptable identity risk management tools take the guesswork out of protecting privileged accounts and strengthening your organization’s security posture. With increased visibility and the bandwidth to handle risk over your entire enterprise, the right technology prevents attacks before they even begin. Read on to learn about identity risk management technology and discover how it can modernize the way your organization views risk.
What is Identity Risk Management?
Identity risk management refers to the process of identifying risky workers and vulnerable identities. Risky users often include workers that fall for phishing schemes, click on questionable links, and engage in generally unsafe online actions. Security measures, as well as targeted controls for specific workers, are put into place to prevent attackers from gaining access to privileged accounts and data. After all, according to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, 37% of all breaches involve the use of stolen credentials, meaning that it’s even more crucial for companies to protect worker and company information.
Vulnerable identities, such as poorly managed access credentials or weak passwords, make it easier for threat actors to infiltrate an organization’s systems and steal proprietary information and data. These identities include people, workloads, endpoints, and even IoT devices.
What are Common Challenges of Identity Risk Management?
Essentially, legacy solutions just aren’t cutting it anymore. These solutions don’t provide enough visibility into worker activity, including shadow administrative accounts. An effective solution requires bandwidth to manage risk among teams and provide the visibility that CISOs need to be informed of their enterprise’s risk posture.
What is Causing the Increase in Identity Risks?
In an increasingly virtual work world, many factors contribute to the uptick in identity risks. Remote desktop protocol (RDP) credentials are the most common access listing on the dark web. Operating remotely also puts workers at an even greater risk of account compromise. Migration to cloud-based platforms requires the spread of privileged credentials across cloud environments, making it easier for attackers to access proprietary information.
Legacy Identity Tools Are Not Risk-Adjusted
Legacy solutions in use today may not be adequate to protect your organization from workforce-targeted cyberattacks. Below, we will dive into each of these solutions to explain why they are no longer suited for today’s identity risk management needs.
Privileged Account Management (PAM)
Privileged Account Management, or PAM, keeps access credentials safe from threat actors using password vaults. Privileged account credentials exist inside a vault, only allowing access to those verified by the PAM system. However, PAM typically lacks visibility and adaptability to changing worker risk levels.
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Identity and access management, or IAM, consists of the processes put in place to keep threat actors from stealing access credentials or proprietary information. Made up of many different technologies, processes, and systems, IAM typically lacks visibility into worker risk. Password fatigue also lessens the effectiveness of IAM, as each application requires a different username and password.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Single sign-on (SSO) aims to streamline the identity risk management process by only requiring one username and password to sign into multiple applications and accounts. While this may be a time-saver, SSO requires strong passwords to be effective. If attackers get hold of this one credential, they’re able to access a myriad of different privileged accounts and steal proprietary information with ease.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, adds an extra layer to your cybersecurity by requiring multiple forms of verification upon login. However, MFA often isn’t well accepted by the general population and isn’t functional on certain servers, systems, or accounts.
Why Security Teams Need a Real-Time and Adaptive Solution for Identity Risk Management
The right technology for identity risk management offers real-time, adaptive solutions to keep your organization one step ahead of attackers at all times. Solutions like Elevate Security aggregate, analyze, and evaluate data to determine worker risk on an individual, departmental, and organizational scale.
Based on this data, the platform can inform existing controls like those above, to the actions of high-risk workers, allowing specific controls to be adjusted continuously in response to changes in individual worker risk, and offering the promise of predicting and preventing attacks before they even have a chance to start. For example, if an employee were to fall once for a phishing test, a risk-based platform could mitigate the real risk of that employee making another mistake by tightening controls around that employee’s account.
Real-time, adaptive identity risk management solutions, like Elevate Security, provide benefits such as:
- Enhanced visibility into vulnerable identities: Building a unique risk profile for each individual employee to simplify how your organization views and manages worker risk.
- Ability to deploy targeted controls: Security teams can preemptively reduce risk and strengthen your enterprise’s security posture by taking a predictive security approach rather than a reactive one.
- Enable security teams to mitigate worker risk and stop attacks in their tracks: Providing an intuitive understanding of potential risk, identity risk management technology helps security professionals understand the risk level in their organization and how to mitigate it.
Final Thoughts
Elevate Security offers a unique approach to applying worker-risk intelligence to identity risk management. With adaptive and real-time controls, our platform is able to provide security teams with much needed visibility into the individual cyber risk levels of their workers.
Book a demo to see how Elevate Security can modernize your identity risk management.
