A Practical Guide to Cyber Security for Small Businesses by Nick Ioannou

Author:Nick Ioannou [Ioannou, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: ITSM Press
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

10.

Admin Privilege

The principle of least privilege can go a long way to raising your security level, because you only give access and authority that is essential for a user to carry out their job. If they are not allowed to do something malicious because system doesn’t let them, it also means they cannot be tricked into doing something malicious or giving away permission for something else to do anything malicious either. This translates to removing administrator privileges to install software for your users, and as it turns out doesn’t cost anything to implement.

User accounts that are not allowed to install software are ‘standard’ users and if they do try to install anything they are prompted to enter the credentials of an account that does have permission. If this prompt to enter admin credentials appears unexpectedly, you can be sure that something triggered it and start to investigate if anything malicious is afoot. Trusted users can know what the admin account password is, so I’m not saying to deny everyone the right to install software or make changes.

Users with admin rights can do more than install software though, they can also change passwords, add new users, change file and folder permissions, and disable security software, which means a piece of malware can do the same, if the user is tricked into running it. To help identify who in your company has admin rights, there are a couple of free Windows utilities which discover your privileged accounts on the network and generate a detailed report.

Privileged Account Discovery Tool by Thycotic

https://thycotic.com/solutions/free-windows-privileged-account-discovery-tool/

Download

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