Privileged Attack Vectors

Book excerpt: See how privileges, insecure passwords, administrative rights, and remote access can be combined as an attack vector to breach any organization. Cyber attacks continue to increase in volume and sophistication. It is not a matter of if, but when, your organization will be breached. Threat actors target the path of least resistance: users and their privileges. In decades past, an entire enterprise might be sufficiently managed through just a handful of credentials. Today’s environmental complexity has seen an explosion of privileged credentials for many different account types such as domain and local administrators, operating systems (Windows, Unix, Linux, macOS, etc.), directory services, databases, applications, cloud instances, networking hardware, Internet of Things (IoT), social media, and so many more. When unmanaged, these privileged credentials pose a significant threat from external hackers and insider threats. We are experiencing an expanding universe of privileged accounts almost everywhere. There is no one solution or strategy to provide the protection you need against all vectors and stages of an attack. And while some new and innovative products will help protect against or detect against a privilege attack, they are not guaranteed to stop 100% of malicious activity. The volume and frequency of privilege-based attacks continues to increase and test the limits of existing security controls and solution implementations. Privileged Attack Vectors details the risks associated with poor privilege management, the techniques that threat actors leverage, and the defensive measures that organizations should adopt to protect against an incident, protect against lateral movement, and improve the ability to detect malicious activity due to the inappropriate usage of privileged credentials. This revised and expanded second edition covers new attack vectors, has updated definitions for privileged access management (PAM), new strategies for defense, tested empirical steps for a successful implementation, and includes new disciplines for least privilege endpoint management and privileged remote access. What You Will Learn Know how identities, accounts, credentials, passwords, and exploits can be leveraged to escalate privileges during an attack Implement defensive and monitoring strategies to mitigate privilege threats and risk Understand a 10-step universal privilege management implementation plan to guide you through a successful privilege access management journeyDevelop a comprehensive model for documenting risk, compliance, and reporting based on privilege session activity Who This Book Is For Security management professionals, new security professionals, and auditors looking to understand and solve privilege access management problems