INSIDER THREAT SECURITY BLOG

Understanding the Risk of Active Directory Permissions and Shadow Access I recently covered the topic of Active Directory permissions by giving an overview on how to apply them and view what already exists in your organization. In this blog, I’ll be taking a deeper dive into Active Directory permissions, outlining potential risks that exist when certain permissions are applied to certain objects. Why Do Active Directory Permissions Create Risk? So how do Active Directory permissions…

A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR), a common term amongst data privacy regulations, is an individual’s right to request information on personally identifiable information (PII) an organization has gathered about them, how that organization is using that data, and who that data has been shared with. Responding to a DSAR could be a daunting task for organizations, which often lack the necessary plumbing to be able to identify exactly where a given individual’s PII exists within their environ…

Today, we are introducing a new method to tackle Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) that will enable our customers to obtain results in seconds. Available as an add-on to complement StealthAUDIT, Data Privacy Engine effectively connects identities with the location of their personal information. Thanks to the pre-discovery of attributes of data subjects across all repositories (structured, unstructured, on-premise, in the cloud, etc.) along with an understanding of which files and tables r…

Active Directory Delegated Permissions Overview The importance of Active Directory permissions cannot be understated, the capability for users to write and perform certain actions against your Active Directory can lead to unintended changes, unnecessary risk for attack vectors and lateral movement, or total domain compromise. In this blog, I’ll be going over, at a high level, how Active Directory permissions are applied, and how to view them natively. In the future, I’ll be covering how t…

The push for data privacy regulation has exploded in recent years, with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) taking center stage. Gartner predicts  “ By 2023, 65% of the world’s population will have its personal information covered under modern privacy regulations, up from 10% today.” For much of the world, this regulatory shift will have a substantial impact on the way businesses collect and process information. However, organi…

Data privacy has become the expectation for every consumer across the globe, becoming more than a set of rules and regulations driven by compliance standards, but rather one of the primary pillars upon which customer loyalty and brand recognition stand upon.  A continuously-developing pandemic, a majority of people working from home, and new data privacy laws regularly – all indications that 2021 will be a huge year for data privacy. COVID-19 Pandemic Leaves a Lasting Impression T…

Having worked with Unix and Linux servers for a long time, one feature that I came to appreciate is the Secure Shell (SSH) daemon.  The SSH server daemon allows users to securely connect to Linux and Unix servers using an SSH client.  Those of you who work with Linux and Unix servers are quite familiar with open-source SSH tools such as Putty and WinSCP.  Personally, I find WinSCP quite helpful as it allows me to transfer files back and forth from my Windows desktop machine to…

If you decided to implement StealthAUDIT to meet your data access governance and security needs, then you made the right decision.  StealthAUDIT core requires a SQL Server database to store the audited data, configuration settings, and certain historic data.  In this blog, I will review some of the best practices when it comes to setting up the SQL Server database to be used by StealthAUDIT.  This blog is not intended to replace the StealthAUDIT Installation Guide, but rather …

With the enactment of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the ever-evolving COVID-19 pandemic, Data Privacy has been at the forefront in 2020 and will remain an important challenge that organizations must take head-on as the way the world works continues to change. Stringent data privacy controls are an essential measure organizations need to take to not only ensure compliance with data privacy regulations but also to maintain customer trust and loyalty in the expanding digital wo…

When your web browser accesses a website, it needs to first translate the friendly URL (ex. stealthbits.com) to the public IP address of the server that hosts that website. This is known as a “DNS lookup”, and traditional DNS is unencrypted (unlike modern HTTPS web traffic that’s almost entirely secured via HTTPS these days). Since HTTPS encrypts your communications with websites once you’ve established a connection, you may be wondering why it matters that DNS, the initial lookup of the…