The last year has been a record-breaking one for data breaches, with the majority being identity-related. Identity and access management (IAM) best practices are crucial to protect your organization from future threats.
Identity-focused security outcomes focus on verifying the identities of people, devices, and machines to secure access to systems and data. To do so, it’s essential to follow the following best practices:
Conduct a Risk Assessment
Whether on a personal level with social and household risk assessment or a more complex scale in the workplace, a well-planned risk assessment process is essential to identifying potential mishaps and creating effective strategies to mitigate them.
Determining risk involves evaluating the impact and likelihood of hazards and ranking them accordingly. It can be a subjective and complex task, especially for businesses with diverse work environments, and should involve a team of individuals familiar with the assessed process.
An identity governance system that tracks account creation can help organizations identify unauthorized user accounts and prevent access breaches. It can also support the principles of least privilege and access monitoring by ensuring that users have only the credentials they need to perform their job functions. In addition, regular penetration testing and asset vulnerability scanning can help companies understand their attack surfaces from both internal and external threat actors. It enables them to prioritize security hardening efforts on the most exposed assets, systems, and networks.
Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Using MFA helps to protect systems and applications by verifying identity beyond the standard username and password combination. MFA requires a minimum of two factors for a user to gain access:
Something they know (like a password or PIN).
Something they have (a hardware token or a mobile device).
Something they are (like a biometric like a fingerprint or retinal scan).
Unauthorized access remains responsible for over half of today’s data breaches, and MFA can provide a critical layer of protection. If a password is compromised, MFA ensures that the account or application can’t be accessed illegitimately.
As part of their identity and access security policy, organizations should consider implementing MFA for all workers and partners to lower the risk of illegal access. For example, if employees use external applications like social verification, they should be required to log in to these with MFA to gain access. It will help prevent passwords from being lost for other accounts and services. Also, MFA can be used with single sign-on (SSO) to eliminate the need for employees to enter authentication information on different sites or apps.
Encryption
Encryption is a cybersecurity measure that scrambles data into an unreadable format or ciphertext. It assists in safeguarding the privacy of digital information kept on computer systems or sent over networks like the Internet. Encrypted data can only be unscrambled with the correct secret code or decryption key. It helps prevent malicious actors, such as advertisement networks, data attackers, and internet service providers, from accessing sensitive information in transit or at rest.
Effective identity security breach management requires a holistic approach to user access control, including identity governance. It helps ensure that only the right people have access to the resources they need to do their jobs while ensuring that permissions are reviewed regularly and that dormant accounts don’t become vulnerable. It also includes access management, which ensures that once a user’s identity has been authenticated, the appropriate level of access is granted. It assists in lowering risk and ensuring compliance with rules, including the PCI DSS, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
Monitoring
Systems must be constantly monitored to detect security anomalies as the most critical components of cybersecurity, identity, and access management (also known as IAM). It involves verifying identities and devices, granting access to data and applications, and ensuring all account activity is logged and audited.
Privileged access management is a significant part of IAM. It entails establishing and upholding security guidelines that guarantee users are only given access to resources they need to perform their work. PAM best practices focus on limiting the number of privileged accounts in your system, separating privileges to reduce the attack surface, and leveraging the least privilege and just-in-time access so that access is never lingering and can be quickly revoked when no longer needed.
Monitoring is crucial because many attacks start with local accounts that must be governed and audited by the central IAM system. Attackers use these local accounts to gain a foothold in your network before they escalate to other more sensitive or critical systems. To avoid false positives that may trigger a response action (e.g., flagging a system administrator as an unusual activity because they are logging in from a remote location on the weekend; however, they could be responding to a business-critical network issue), include manual procedures that determine whether an action is suspicious before taking any response actions.
Reporting
With phishing emails and weak passwords still on the rise, threat actors are finding more and more ways to break into systems. But you can take steps to delay, if not prevent, the damage.
One of the best things you can do is regularly monitor your system for unauthorized activity and breaches in progress. It can help identify weaknesses in your security architecture and address them before a breach occurs.
You can also use reporting to check whether employees are following security policies. For example, it’s essential to ensure that employees change their passwords regularly and use multi-factor authentication when accessing sensitive data or applications.
Finally, you can use identity and access management (IAM) solutions to ensure users get secure access to company resources at work. IAM enables you to create a secure zero-trust framework and enforce least privilege access principles across the entire infrastructure. These technologies can also find and mitigate identity threats, ensuring your systems are protected by enforcing policies, including password standards, for all identities in use and checking compliance and visibility into your IAM systems and SaaS apps.
