decrypting myths
basics, such
as vulnerability
management.
You should also
enforce strong
controls over the use of
credentials – always with
a clear line-of-sight into who
is using the credential and for
what purpose.
Authenticate user
behaviour
Vendor and partner credentials
are often very weak and
susceptible to inadvertent
disclosure. Therefore, the best
way to protect credentials is
to proactively manage and
control them. You can do this
by eliminating shared accounts,
enforcing onboarding and using
background checks to identity-
proof third-party individuals that
are accessing your systems.
Prevent unauthorised
commands and mistakes
using physical or logical network
segmentation and channel access
through known pathways.
You can accomplish this by leveraging a
privileged access management solution to
restrict unapproved protocols and direct
approved sessions to a predefined route.
Apply multiple robust
internal safeguards
As with other types of threats, a multi-
layered defence is key to protecting
against threats arising from third-party
access. Apply encryption, multi-
factor authentication (MFA) and a
comprehensive data security policy,
among other measures.
www.intelligentciso.com
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Issue 15
Educate your internal and
external stakeholders
On average, it takes about 197 days
for an organisation to realise that it has
been breached. A lot of damage can be
done in 197 days. Educate across the
enterprise and continually reinforce the
message that the risks are real.
Conduct vendor assessments
Your service-level agreement (SLA) with
third-party vendors should spell out the
security standards you expect them to
comply with and you should routinely
review compliance performance with
your vendors. At a minimum, your
vendors should implement the security
One step you want to take is to
broker permissions to various
target systems using different
accounts, each with varying
levels of permission.
You should restrict the commands that
a specific user can apply, via blacklists
and whitelists, to provide a high degree
of control and flexibility.
To this end, use a privileged access
management solution, enable fine-
grained permission controls and enforce
the principle of least privilege (PoLP).
Vendor access is often inadequately
controlled, making it a favoured target
of cyberattackers.
By layering on these seven steps, you
can exert better control over third-
party access to your environment
and make significant progress toward
reducing cyber-risk. u
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