In every organization there exists a somewhat buried but very dangerous keyhole, that is the presence of administrative accounts which are not part of the Domain Users. Those accounts are actually hidden from the IT manager’s standard tracked list of domain administrative accounts and can be used by malware to install malicious software on local computers through the “local” administrator account.  Further penetration into the IT environment is then accessible by capturing passwords, including passwords for access to critical data.   It is essential that IT security and operations managers have a method for mitigating this risk.

Sign-up today for our 35 minute live demo session featuring our free tool Local Admin Discovery that allows you to discover user accounts and groups that are members of the local “Administrators” built-in user group on computers in your Windows domain.

Reserve your seat today by signing up here.

Wednesday January 4th, 2012 9:30AM EST

Info Security Products Guide, the industry's leading information security research and advisory guide, has named Viewfinity a finalist in the three top categories applied for in the  2012 Global Excellence Awards Products and Services Excellence nominations. The categories for which we applied are directly related to the value we provide to our customers. The fact that our product is a finalist in categories that are based upon actual use case scenarios distinguishes our success and validates our relentless drive to provide tangible value.  More information related to why our customers were chosen can be viewed in our online case studies, which explains how we have align our product to meet their needs.

The finalist categories for Advanced, Ground-breaking products are:

·         Security Products and Solutions for Education

·         Best Deployment and Case Studies in the USA

·         Policy Management

Chapter 6 outlines the options that are available when Active Directory (AD) Group Policy Objects (GPOs) are used to deploy Viewfinity privilege policies.  A GPO based deployment is a simple and straightforward way to enable a number of privilege management capabilities. This chapter will highlight those capabilities and compare and contrast a Viewfinity server-based solution to help an organization determine which deployment method is most appropriate for their specific requirements.

Download the eBook chapters here.

Do the terms “hacker” or “cyber attack” catch your attention?  They should and if they don’t then you should definitely read “Experts to business owners: Beware of hackers” by Charles McChesney of The Post-Standard. While there are endless attempts from cyber criminals to compromise your network, there are ways to significantly mitigate these attempts. 

A fundamental approach and best practice is implementing and enforcing the “principle of least privilege” at your company.  Employees will be limited to only parts of the network and to applications they need to perform their daily work functions.  This means employees cannot install suspicious software or manipulate system settings.  This reduces the risks of viruses entering your network such as “crimeware” that captures keystrokes similar to what happened to the Central New York Business owner in the article. 

Be proactive, remove administrator rights from your end users and manage the permissions standard users require through automated policies. 

Viewfinity’s customer, Monique Sendze, Associate Director of Information Technology for Douglas County, discusses how Viewfinity is used in their environment on this webcast presented via Federal Computer Week and GCN earlier this week.  Douglas County removed administrator rights from end users and moved to a least privileges environment to adhere to FDCC compliance and they needed a method to elevate privileges for end users to complete software deployment and upgrades without sacrificing security, end user productivity or exhausting IT resources. Douglas County saved $180,000+ in IT costs within 6 months of implementing the software.

Click here to view the webcast recording

A project to remove administrative rights with the minimal amount of disruption to your end users, when done properly, requires extensive analysis to determine user needs and prepare the environment.  As organizations work to heighten IT security by moving to least privileges, Viewfinity provides a non-disruptive, automated method for moving to least privileges via an end-to-end best practice approach that helps enterprises prepare the environment before privileges are revoked.  

Preliminary Preparation:  Pre-Discover Applications Requiring Elevated Permissions

Our Application Admin Rights Analysis silently gathers information and monitors which applications, processes, and administrative actions will require administrative permission before users are removed from the local admin group. This information is based on end user activity and is collected over a period of time to ensure all events are captured. Once the collection and analysis is completed, policies to elevate privileges can be automatically created and prepared in advance so that when administrative rights are removed, the policies are in place to ensure a non-disruptive move to least privileges.As part of this process, Viewfinity has a Local Admin Rights Usage Statistic dashboard.  This is a graphical “readiness indicator” of where an organization stands in terms of determining the optimal point in which they are prepared to remove administrator rights.   

Here is an example of a completed Application Admin Rights Analysis presented in the Local Admin Rights Usage Statistic dashboard graph:

This report shows the following:

·         Events marked in Green represent events which have been identified from user activities on previous days.

·         Events marked in Red represent newly discovered events that require Admin rights.

·         Readiness indicator:  when the discovery bar is mostly green, the system has collected the majority of events requiring administrative permissions. This indicates you are ready to use the Viewfinity Policy Automation Approval feature and automatically build policies based on the events discovered.

Read more about our end-to-end process here: http://www.viewfinity.com/Whats-New/Default.aspx