Protected: Understanding Privileged Identity Theft

Is your biggest threat already inside your network?

What do seven of the ten largest data breaches in the 21st century have in common? Privileged identity theft, the compromise of credentials to privileged accounts, was explicitly mentioned or indicated in post-mortem reviews of these mega-breaches.1 In these breaches, well-resourced, external actors, some with the backing of nation states, were able to gain the credentials of users with access to privileged accounts such as administrative or service accounts enabling them to collect and exfiltrate massive amounts of data.Although difficult to quantify the impact of these breaches, the total number of records is in the billions and includes credit card details, user accounts, employee information, health records and more. By stealing the identity of a privileged user, one with access rights to administrative and service accounts cyber criminals can steal data on an industrial scale. And these mega-breaches don’t include security incidents involving intentional sabotage to critical assets such as the attack on the national power grid that occurred in the Ukraine in 2015 and 2016.

This white paper will explain why privileged identities pose such a risk to enterprises, how they are compromised by attackers, how current methods fail to stop these threats, and how your organization can protect itself.