Privileged Access Management (PAM) remains one of the most important areas of investments for organizations to prevent hackers and malicious insiders from stealing valuable data. CyberArk (NASDAQ:CYBR) is the leader in PAM, and is therefore a buy, in our view.
What are Privileged Accounts and why you need to secure them
Business users accessing IT resources such as PCs, servers, network devices and email applications need to authenticate themselves with a user account and a password to that resource. Depending on the permissions granted on that resource, a user is only allowed to do tasks that they have been permissioned for. Administrators of the resource have special privileges, and their accounts are called Privileged Accounts. Privileged Accounts are special accounts that are often referred to as “keys to the kingdom”, granting the user the full access to the resource. For instance, they can create accounts for other users, delete accounts of others users, access other users accounts to reset password for instance, etc. Examples of some Privileged Accounts include Unix root, Windows and Database administrator accounts (DBAs), etc.
In an organization that does not utilize a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, an administrator logs into an IT system directly using a Privileged Account login and password. If there are multiple administrators within an organization, they all share the same Privileged Account login and the password. If one of the administrators maliciously damages the resource (for example, deletes an important file), there is no way for the business to find out who deleted the file, since all the admins share the same credentials. On top of this, the logins and the passwords are typically saved in a spreadsheet or a word document and is made accessible to all those needing them. This creates a major risk for the organization if that file is compromised. Using privileged credentials, hackers or malicious insiders can take control of the
