While the adoption of web applications has been on the rise and has brought flexibility and increased productivity, organisations often lag in implementing the security controls necessary to mitigate risk of human error or malicious intent, according to a report by CyberArk.
According to the report, “organisations continue to operate with limited visibility into user activity and sessions associated with web applications, despite the ever-present risk of insider threats and credential theft.”
The report is based on a global survey of 900 enterprise security leaders.
As per the report, 80 per cent of organisations experienced employees misusing or abusing access to business applications in over the past year.
As many as 48 per cent of organisations surveyed said they have limited ability to view user logs and audit user activity, leaving a blind spot for catching potentially risky behaviour in user sessions.
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Additionally, in 70 per cent of organisations, the average end-user has access to over ten business applications. Many of these contain high-value data, creating ample opportunity for a malicious actor. “To that end, the top-three high-value applications that organisations were most concerned with protecting against unauthorized access were IT service management apps such as ServiceNow, cloud consoles such as Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform and marketing and sales enablement applications such as Salesforce,” the report said.
“For many security teams, investigation into questionable user activity represents a significant investment of time and drag on thin resources, and must be balanced with other priorities such as improving incident response and enforcing consistent controls across applications to reduce threat of credential theft,” it added.
However, as per the survey, more than 54 per cent of organisations investigate user activity stemming from security incidents or compliance at least weekly. This is in comparison to 34 per cent of organisations that investigate monthly.
As many as 44 per cent of organisations further said that they needed to enable the same security controls across all applications amid disparate built-in application controls.
According to 41 per cent of respondents, better visibility into user activity would enable them to identify the source of a security incident more quickly. “Ensuring security and usability is key. As more high-value data migrates to the cloud, organisations should make certain the proper controls follow suit to manage risk accordingly while enabling their workforce to operate without disruption,” said Gil Rapaport, general manager, Access Management, CyberArk.
“Today, any user can have a certain level of privileged access, making it ever more important that enterprises add security layers to protect the entire workforce as part of a comprehensive identity security strategy and zero trust framework,” added Rapaport.
