CyberArk Research: Lack of Security Controls and Visibility Into User Activity Continue to Put Organizations at Risk

November 02, 2021 at 08:30 AM EDT

News summary:

80 percent of organizations report employee misuse or abuse of access to business applications
Nearly half of organizations said they have limited ability to view user logs and audit user activity
The average end-user has access to more than 10 business applications, many of which contain high-value data

New research released today by CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR), the global leader in Identity Security, reveals that organizations 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. While the adoption of web applications has brought flexibility and increased productivity, organizations often lag in implementing the security controls necessary to mitigate risk of human error or malicious intent.

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Across organizations, users have access to high-value data in business applications (Graphic: Business Wire)

The global survey of 900 enterprise security leaders found that 80 percent of organizations experienced employees misusing or abusing access to business applications in the past year. This comes as 48 percent of organizations surveyed said they have limited ability to view user logs and audit user activity, leaving a blind spot for catching potentially risky behavior in user sessions.

The new research coincides with the general availability of the first-of-its-kind CyberArk Identity Secure Web Sessions, a cloud-based solution that enables organizations to record and protect user web application sessions.

Consider financial, healthcare, marketing or developer web applications that contain sensitive, high-value data like financial records, customer or patient information or intellectual property. Most security and compliance teams have limited resources, visibility and control over how confidential data is being handled, or what is being done during a user session.

According to the research, in 70 percent of organizations, the average end-user has access to more than 10 business applications, many of which contain high-value data – creating ample opportunity for a malicious actor. To that end, the top-three high-value applications that organizations 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.

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.

According to the research:

More than half (54 percent) of organizations investigate user activity stemming from security incidents or compliance at least weekly vs. 34 percent of organizations that investigate monthly
Forty four percent of organizations said they need to enable the same security controls across all applications amid disparate built-in application controls
Forty one percent of respondents said that 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, organizations 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.”

Secure Web Sessions Adds Layers of Security to High-Risk User Activity

CyberArk Identity Secure Web Sessions helps enterprises gain visibility into user activity within web-based applications protected by CyberArk Workforce Identity and third-party Single Sign-On (SSO) providers. Secure Web Sessions enables organizations to:

Record and search every click and data change made within a protected app while maintaining a frictionless user experience
Implement continuous monitoring and re-authentication, such as when a user steps away from a device during a session, reducing risk of abuse
Protect web sessions from threats originating on the endpoint and restrict data exfiltration actions, such as copying of data and file downloads.

Additional Resources:

About the Survey

Commissioned by CyberArk, this research is based on a Censuswide survey of 900 security decision makers and leaders at medium to enterprise-sized organizations in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and Singapore.

About CyberArk

CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR) is the global leader in Identity Security. Centered on privileged access management, CyberArk provides the most comprehensive security offering for any identity – human or machine – across business applications, distributed workforces, hybrid cloud workloads and throughout the DevOps lifecycle. The world’s leading organizations trust CyberArk to help secure their most critical assets. To learn more about CyberArk, visit https://www.cyberark.com, read the CyberArk blogs or follow on Twitter via @CyberArk, LinkedIn or Facebook.