On June 17, 2011, Christopher Drew and Verne g. Kopytoff of The New York Times recently talked about Deploying New Tools to Stop the Hackers. Christopher and Verne discuss security tools such as firewalls, anti-virus solutions, black listing, and white listing.  There is arguement that these are great tools for security protection, especially when layered together to provide the most secure defense against attacks. However, there is one crucial piece missing that cannot be overlooked and that is the removing of administrator rights from users and moving to a least privilege environment.

When users have administrator rights on their corporate machines, they often will treat it as their own.  Users will install and download unapproved applications and software that can ultimately be the breaking point of a security breach.  A company is at a higher risk when their users have administrator rights.  You can mitigate these risks when your users are not running with administrator rights.  Once administrator rights are removed from your users, it is important to provide a way to manage privileges and policies that is non-disruptive to your end users.  This is where a solution like Viewfinity’s Privilege Management can help.  Viewfinity’s Privilege Management Solution is implemented without disrupting the productivity of your end users.  IT administrators have granular-level control over what applications and privileges are approved for end users.  This crucial step of removing administrator rights and managing applications and privileges in a least privilege environment provides the solid foundation and firewalls, anti-virus solutions, black listing, and white listing are the layers of additional protection.

Now that you are aware of how much cyber criminals are benefiting financially, take action to not be part of the growing $150 million scheme and protect against Advanced Persistent Threats.