Security and data breaches are becoming alarmingly common in today’s technological world. Every day brings more news of data being compromised, with reports suggesting that 7 million data records are compromised every day.
While many organizations look outside to find the root of these data breaches, the problem usually lies within. Poor access control mechanisms can (and all too often do) result in access control breaches.
Most organizations deploy extensive access control systems to keep breaches at bay. However, these systems can sometimes have huge weaknesses that leave doors open for disaster.
Sometimes access control looks effective in books but might prove to be useless in real-life scenarios. In other cases, malicious employees might be behind access control breaches. Regardless of the cause, these breaches can be disastrous.
There are several types of access control breaches that can cripple organizations and expose valuable information to snoopers. Let's look at the popular types of access control breaches and explore how Foxpass can help defend against them.
Privilege Misuse
Your employees know the exact location of your sensitive data and the loopholes in the access control mechanism. As such, one of the most significant types of access control breach occurs at the hands of employees within an organization.
You can deploy the best access control system for your organization, but a malicious employee can still easily misuse their privilege to gain access to an organization’s most critical data.
Even with standard user privilege, a user can access the memory of all processes running under a user account. From there, an employee can easily integrate malicious code in the user processes, access the backdoor of the system, intercept keystrokes, and modify the content in the browser.
Standard user privileges are suitable enough to allow a user to download a plugin and integrate a backdoor and keylogger into the system.
Privilege misuse is, therefore, one of the most common and dangerous types of access control breaches and needs to be monitored for.
Negligence
Negligence is another type of internal access control breach that poses a threat to an organization.
People make mistakes all the time. As such, it’s reasonable to assume that someone with managerial access to company data can make a dumb mistake when it comes to data handling. Management or employees taking a casual attitude towards security issues has, in many instances, created disastrous results.
Keeping valuable data or equipment unattended is another critical mistake people can often make, which can lead to security and data breaches within the organization.
Rogue employees or snooping outsiders can take advantage of this negligence, access the critical data of the organization, and create a severe threat to security.
Domain Attack
Domain accounts are the accounts of most corporate users within an organization. These accounts allow users to access the network services of a corporate network and usually provide access to network services by default.
As a result, if an infected user or a malicious insider has access to the corporate database, then it is easy to breach corporate data.
Domain access and authorization also allow attackers to access the network disks and network folders of the user, share internal resources, and even gain access to other workstations in the same network.
During an active session, attackers can easily utilize network services such as remote access, SVN, FTP, TFS, GIT, and SSH to breach the workstations of users with higher privilege.
Outsider Breach Due to Poor Access Control Mechanisms
A poor access control mechanism can allow outsiders to gain unauthorized access to organizational data. Outsider breaches can typically be attributed directly to a lack of proper access control mechanisms.
Sometimes, admin privileges can be poorly monitored within an organization. At other times, the third-party applications used inside the organization can introduce vulnerabilities and security breaches. An attacker can easily utilize these loopholes to breach critical organizational data.
Accidental Web Exposure
Organizations are migrating more and more data to the cloud today. However, with the introduction of cloud-based architecture, the possibility of accidentally exposing critical information to the web increases significantly. Cloud security is exceptionally important, especially when organizations store sensitive information on the cloud, and cloud access needs to be strictly managed and monitored.
Remote Worker Breaches
Remote workers are often critical to businesses these days. As an unfortunate side effect, remote worker breaches are becoming more common.
Some employees work remotely permanently, while some do so occasionally. While remote work improves the quality of life and productivity, it can come with a cost to organizational security.
There are two cases where remote work can serve to pose a threat to organizational security:
First, there is the possibility that a remote worker uses an insecure Internet connection to access the work system. This problem is less significant when using a home network but is magnified when remote workers access the work system using public Wi-Fi®.
A competent hacker can easily access backdoors in public Wi-Fi®, install keystroke loggers, and damage the victim's computer.
Another security threat arises when the remote worker’s device is stolen. If the victim is logged into a work account, the chances of a competent hacker obtaining access to sensitive data increase significantly.
How Foxpass Can Help
With all the threats and vulnerabilities organizations face, cyber security is more important than ever. Businesses need a solution that protects their networks and uses while providing secure access to their networks.
This is where Foxpass comes in. Foxpass provides advanced access control, giving organizations robust control over what users can access their network, so unauthorized users are kept away.Foxpass uses cloud RADIUS, PKI, cloud LDAP, and SSH Keys to manage which devices can connect and monitor access, supporting security and meeting IT compliance regulations. At the same time, user accounts are protected with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect against unauthorized access.
Upgrade Your Security
Want to protect your network from unauthorized users and data breaches? Join Foxpass today and significantly reduce the chance of a data breach occurring due to sloppy network access control methods:
