In what have could easily been a scene in a spy movie, a Chinese hacker called Storm-0558 managed to forge authentication tokens using a weakness in Azure Active Directory giving them unauthorised access to the data and applications of approximately 25 organisations, including government entities. This is another example showing that in today's day and age, your credentials just aren't safe anymore. Malicious hackers have changed the ways to get unauthorised access in a response to the increasing cloud adoption. According to Verizon's 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report, unauthorised access to web applications, such cloud data lakes and data warehouses, has emerged as the favourite method of attack. Attackers are increasingly resorting to using stolen credentials to carry out these breaches. But contrarily to what the movies want to make you believe, the population of hackers is not limited to a handful of super advanced, hoody-wearing teenagers that know how to exploit obscure vulnerabilities. Social engineering, a technique where you use psychological tricks to gain unauthorised access, is becoming an increasingly popular technique to separate you from your credentials, and the recent advances in AI will make it ever so easy.
As such, every organisation will become a target. Including yours!
So, in a world where credentials can be compromised at any given moment, it is imperative to minimise the potential damage when this occurs. This requires applying least privilege access management, a framework where you restrict an individuals' access to the data they absolutely need to carry out their tasks. In fact, regulators will require organisations to implement least privilege access management in the upcoming security regulations and standards in the EU (NIS2, CER, DORA), the UK (NIS2), and the US (NIST2).
However, least privilege access management is particularly challenging in data analytics and data science, where you store data from different domains, lines of businesses, and entities in one location. Least privilege access management in these scenarios means managing access at the data set level. This is very hard and it becomes nearly impossible in a multi cloud environment, which is not uncommon in the modern data stack.
You need a helping hand.
That's why we're super excited to announce Raito Insights! Raito insights gives you unified and unparalleled insights in data access & usage patterns across your organisation's hybrid cloud data stack. Our easy to understand interface lets you detect overprivileged users, excessively generous access controls, and mission critical data sets across your all of your data sources. Everything in one view! Combined with our recommendations you can use Raito to remediate any risks to your least privilege access management, without disrupting your data operations.
When I use Raito Insights, I always start with the Insights Dashboard which gives me aggregated access, usage and risk metrics for:
What I absolutely love about this dashboard is the fact that it shows a unified view across all your databases, data warehouses and data lakes, saving me hours from having to go into these different systems. This is really a strong feat of engineering from our team's part!
I use the Dashboard to detect some immediate issues, which I can then double click on to get a more detailed view using the Detailed Insights.
The high-level insights give you an immediate overview and help you discover issues. You can use the detailed insights to investigate further, and decide on remediation actions that you can implement directly into Raito, or using your other data tools.
For each user, data object, and access control, you can have detailed views of their access & usage:
We understand how difficult it is to implement least privilege access management. That's why we have a free version of Raito that lets you already get Insights in access & usage. This way you can get a better understanding of where you are today, and plan accordingly.
Don't wait! Request your free instance today!
Bart
