6 Ways Privileged Accounts are Misused

An organization’s IT team uses multiple user accounts and passwords for managing network devices, servers, databases, and applications. It is not much of a concern if your company is small and there is only one IT administrator. However, things go wrong when your business expands, and more people start accessing these accounts. Service or domain administrator accounts generally allow unrestricted access to data and system. If you don’t have privileged access management in place to control and protect these accounts, you run the risk of facing a high-level threat to your enterprise security. Large companies usually have numerous privileged accounts. If they are not monitored, former employees, cyber hackers, and even insiders can misuse these identities to access and exploit enterprise data. Here are six ways privileged accounts are misused:

1. Keeping Passwords on a Datasheet

The IT team often stores administrator passwords on a spreadsheet, which make them easily accessible to all the staff members accessing the accounts. Maintaining a sheet may make your IT personnel’s job easy, but how do you know who is accessing the passwords and for what purpose? Your critical business information may fall into the hands of a rogue insider or a hacker who may misuse it.

2. Former Employees Accessing Privileged Accounts

Former employees, IT administrators, or contractors often leave their employment and keep account passwords active long after they have resigned. This may pose a potential threat to your company’s assets, data, and intellectual property. Just because a former staff has left the job does not mean he will not access your company’s privileged accounts and create security threats.

3. Reusing a Password across Multiple Systems

System administrators frequently use the same passwords for multiple systems or among different administrators to make their jobs a tad easier. This may be extremely convenient for your IT team, but a cyber hacker can use the shared passwords and gain access to your systems throughout the network.

4. Hacker Gains Elevated Rights of Access

Do you know that an apparently harmless email might be the smart work of a dangerous and unscrupulous hacker? An employee in your organization may receive such a mail and unsuspectingly click on a malicious link, thus giving a cyber hacker exclusive rights to access your corporate network. A hacker may persuade an innocent user to divulge his password or install a flash drive with a computer virus that helps in executing a malicious activity.

5. Application Misuse

Businesses that fail to update their web applications with necessary security patches give hackers an opportunity to access their data. This means that your database platforms, web services software, and other applications are susceptible to security threats.

6. Misuse of Default Passwords

Many applications, hardware devices, and appliances such as the Unified Threat Management (UTM) and firewalls come with pre-configured and default passwords. Most people know these passwords, and not changing these might give hackers an opportunity to access data easily and create havoc.

No business wants a security threat, but breaches do occur. Therefore, it is important to keep administrator accounts secure with privileged access management. Remember that your business applications, tools, and computing resources are high-value targets for cyber hackers, and you must protect them.