According to a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University - critical system disruptions, loss of information of customers and partners, loss of confidential intellectual property, brute-force attacks, fraud, reputation risk, etc. were mostly attributed to actions by insiders.
The grave dangers of insider threats, arising from employees retaining their system and/or having physical access even after job termination, can be understood from a shocking incident that took place recently. A US-based Water Service Company auditor, who resigned from his post, sneaked into the company's building and accessed a former coworker's computer to transfer $9 million from the company's fund to his personal account.
Insider threats, in which the disgruntled employees or ex-employees, gain access to computer systems or networks of the enterprise, is one of the cases of improper Identity Management!
Proliferating Disconnected Identities – Root Cause for Mismanagement of Identities!
In most organizations, it is seen that logical and physical identities often see excessive increase in numbers, making it difficult for the organization to track and manage all the identities effectively.
On the logical side, an employee may have one identity within the enterprise HR system, such as a SAP system. That identity typically consists of salary, benefits, insurance and other specific employee details. Then there is a logical identity, for the same employee, within the information technology department's directory software - such as those from Microsoft, Novell, CA, Sun Microsystems, or Oracle. This directory controls the permissions for network, database and software applications for the logical identity. Within the organizations' Intranets, databases and applications, the user may have still more identities, in the form of different user IDs and passwords or PINs he/she uses to log into each logical resource of organization. This employee will have at least one more identity: a physical credential of some sort used for access to organization infrastructure –workstations, buildings, floors, parking garages, warehouses, research lab etc.
Then, there are cases of merger or acquisitions of organizations which often results in more than one brand of Physical Access Control System (PACS) in the organization. In enterprises with more than one brand of PACS and several facilities or areas users must enter, a user may have more than one physical access credential—and therefore, more than one physical identity.
Unconverged identity management systems either result in error-prone manual interventions or security issues!
Next: The Need for Converging Identities
