SPHERE’s CEO & Founder, Rita Gurevich, was featured in Forbes Councils newest publication “Three Reasons Why Your Company Needs Robust Identity Hygiene and How to Implement It”

With the increase in virtual work environments, online employee credentials and mismanaged identity access present a unique problem for highly regulated organizations and enterprises. According to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, “The human element continues to be a key driver of 82% of breaches.” Once a threat actor is in the door, hidden malware and compromised credentials can offer even more access to an organization’s sensitive data.

To prevent attacks that use employee credentials to gain access to highly sensitive information, organizations need robust and reliable identity hygiene to clean up their security posture. Identity hygiene covers the strategy that organizations and individuals put in place to regularly maintain data, infrastructure and application security.

The goal of identity hygiene is to ensure the right people have the right access to the right information, so no data is accessed maliciously.

Increased visibility limits how identities are created and managed.

As an organization, you can’t exactly protect yourself from threats you don’t know exist. With a majority of data breaches being attributed to open access and a lack of preventative countermeasures put in place, inherent risk is the true problem at hand. Security teams need to know exactly who has access to what data and what entitlements they hold while doing so.

Once you have full visibility into access controls, you can standardize the process to ensure that as identities are created or modified, you’ll capture the fundamentals about the identity, who owns it and what it is used for.

This offers security teams more control over an organization’s cyber risk profile, allowing them the authority they need to proactively address malicious activity, rather than having delayed reactions to threats, most likely when they’ve already had the opportunity to cause damage.

Read the full article here: