Most people are aware these days of the malicious intent that cyber criminals have to exploit technical flaws in our modern computing methods in order to commit fraud or disrupt businesses and peoples’ lives for their own selfish gain but social engineering has now also started to become a problem too.  This involves an approach where attackers use humans as the channel to reach their targets. Modern hacking attempts result in an increasing focus on the human vulnerabilities of an information system instead of focussing on lapses in software or hardware.

 

Social engineering comes in many forms. It could look like an email that has been designed to seem like it is from a credible organisation or trusted colleague – clicking on an attachment or responding to that email with your username and password could automatically install malware or ransomware, compromising your network security.  Identity and access management (IAM) is the organisational process for identifying, authenticating and authorising users to have access to applications, systems or networks. User rights and restrictions with established identities are associated with IAM.

 

The move to the cloud, the digitalisation of the modern world and the resulting growth in cyber threats continue to expand the use cases for IAM.  The growing scope and complexity of modern identity environments is also becoming too difficult to manage in the usual ways, requiring IT leaders to evolve their IAM environments. Vulnerability management solutions such as F-Secure’s RADAR assist with combating this problem by providing comprehensive visibility into a network with effective security mapping through precise discovery and mapping of all assets, systems and application data on the network and beyond.

 

The number of identities for people, things, services and robotic process automation bots also keep on growing. IAM systems allow users to prove (via trusted third parties) their own identity to remotely access business data and services securely. The RADAR solution manages vulnerabilities centrally with security alerts and forensics in real-time to better monitor IAM processes on a business network.

 

Organisations need to consider the five “W’s” of privileged access — who, when, where, why and what — and craft a robust, hybrid, multi-cloud IAM strategy around those factors. Identity management systems should allow companies to automatically manage multiple users in different situations and computing environments in real-time. Additionally, authentication must be simple for users to perform and easy for IT to deploy and secure.