Managing the privileged

Trusted and high-level customer staff may be offered privileged network access and this may not be well managed or monitored

A small group of employees in any organisation will have the ability to wreak havoc on IT infrastructure and the business it is there to serve – they are the privileged users that manage it.

Granting privileges to such users is necessary for them to be able to do their jobs, but when things go wrong the consequences can be dire.

The actions to blame may be unintentional, but because of the high level access the ‘accidents’ of privileged users can be far more serious than those of normal users. They may wipe a disk or crash a server at peak times.

And some privileged users abuse their status. Examples include Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel, who used his privileged access to perpetrate a €4.9bn fraud, and UBS systems administrator Roger Duronio, who was convicted in 2006 for sabotaging his employers IT systems in retaliation over a compensation dispute.

It is not just the privileged themselves that are the problem; privileged accounts are often targeted by hackers. Such accounts are often left with default settings at installation, making them easier to access than many ‘normal’ accounts.

If a hacker gets in this way, too, they will have far wider access to the target systems. This is how UK hacker Gary McKinnon broke into the Pentagon’s systems in the US.

It is not just in an organisation’s own interest to get the privileged-user issue under control. Regulators and standards bodies have something to say about the matter too.

The ISO 27001 IT security standard states that the allocation and use of privileges shall be restricted and controlled. The Payment Card Industries Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), to which any business taking credit or debit card payments should adhere, recommends auditing all privileged user activity as well as avoiding the use of vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords.

Despite all this, when we interviewed 270 IT managers across Europe we found that many organisations still allow poor practice around the management of privileged users.

You can see our results in the report, ‘Privileged user management – It’s time to take control’, which is free to CRN readers at: http://www.quocirca.com/pages/analysis/reports/view/store250/item22042/?link\\_683=22042\\
Take-up of certain IT security standards is high. Sixty per cent of respondents said they had implemented or would implement ISO 27001. Even so, about half also admitted to sharing of privileged user accounts -- meaning no one privileged user can be held to account when things go wrong, including some that have implemented these IT security standards.

A standard is often implemented gradually and selectively. However, those who are reassured by a given organisation’s compliance claims might be shocked to find that underlying weaknesses in IT management can remain.

While all this sounds a bit gloomy, for resellers there are services and product opportunities. An assessment of any organisation that has not addressed the privileged user issue – and only about 25 per cent have – may expose some of the weaknesses outlined. Then a case can be made for buying tools for privileged user management (PUM).

PUM tools allow the monitoring of software, including operating systems, databases and applications, to ensure privileged-user accounts are not left with default passwords and are only granted to certain people. They also enable continuous monitoring of users while acting under privilege, creating an audit trail that protects users themselves as well as the business.

To sell such tools to IT managers may prove tricky, as they are being asked to limit their own activities. You may need buy-in from business managers as well, who should be shocked at their organisation’s exposure via privileged access.

Bob Tarzey is service director at Quocirca