All news with #least privilege tag

Application Containment and Ringfencing for Zero Trust

🔒 Ringfencing, or granular application containment, enforces least privilege for authorized software by restricting file, registry, network, and interprocess access. It complements allowlisting by preventing misuse of trusted tools that attackers commonly weaponize, such as scripting engines and archivers. Effective rollout uses a monitoring agent, simulated denies, and phased enforcement to minimize operational disruption. Properly applied, containment reduces lateral movement, blocks mass exfiltration and ransomware encryption while preserving business workflows.

Rethinking Identity in the AI Era: Building Trust Fast

🔐 CISOs are grappling with an accelerating identity crisis as stolen credentials and compromised identities account for a large share of breaches. Experts warn that traditional, human-centric IAM models were not designed for agentic AI and the thousands of autonomous agents that can act and impersonate at machine speed. The SINET Identity Working Group advocates an AI Trust Fabric built on cryptographic, proofed identities, dynamic fine-grained authorization, just-in-time access, explicit delegation, and API-driven controls to reduce risks such as prompt injection, model theft, and data poisoning.

What CISOs Should Know About Securing MCP Servers Now

🔒 The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables AI agents to connect to data sources, but early specifications lacked robust protections, leaving deployments exposed to prompt injection, token theft, and tool poisoning. Recent protocol updates — including OAuth, third‑party identity provider support, and an official MCP registry — plus vendor tooling from hyperscalers and startups have improved defenses. Still, authentication remains optional and gaps persist, so organizations should apply zero trust and least‑privilege controls, enforce strong secrets management and logging, and consider specialist MCP security solutions before production rollout.

Extending Zero Trust to Autonomous AI Agents in Enterprises

🔐 As enterprises deploy AI assistants and autonomous agents, existing security frameworks must evolve to treat these agents as first-class identities rather than afterthoughts. The piece advocates applying Zero Trust principles—identity-first access, least-privilege, dynamic contextual enforcement, and continuous monitoring—to agentic identities to prevent misuse and reduce attack surface. Practical controls include scoped, short-lived tokens, tiered trust models, strict access boundaries, and assigning clear human ownership to each agent.

Moving Beyond Frameworks: Real-Time Risk Assessments

🔍 Organizations are shifting from annual, checklist-driven compliance to targeted, frequent risk assessments that address emerging threats in real time. The article contrasts gap analyses — which measure adherence to frameworks like NIST or ISO — with tailored risk reviews focused on specific threat paths (for example, access control, ransomware, AI or cloud misconfigurations). It recommends small, repeatable questionnaires, a simple scoring model and executive-ready outputs to prioritize remediation and integrate risk into governance.

Why Enterprises Still Struggle with Cloud Misconfigurations

🔒 Enterprises continue to struggle with cloud misconfigurations that expose sensitive data, according to recent industry reporting and a Qualys study. The report cites a 28% breach rate tied to cloud or SaaS services over the past year and high misconfiguration rates across AWS (45%), GCP (63%) and Azure (70%). Experts blame permissive provider defaults, shadow IT and rapid business-driven deployments, and recommend controls such as MFA everywhere, private networking, encryption, least-privilege and infrastructure-as-code.

Identity Failures Now Top Source of Cloud Risk in 2025

🔒 ReliaQuest's Q3 2025 telemetry found identity-related weaknesses were responsible for 44% of true‑positive cloud alerts, including excessive permissions, misconfigured roles and credential abuse. The report warns credentials and cloud keys often appear on crime markets — sometimes for as little as $2 — while 99% of cloud identities are reportedly over‑privileged, enabling stealthy access. It also highlights how rapid DevOps deployments can replicate legacy vulnerabilities and urges adoption of short‑lived credentials, strict least‑privilege controls and CI/CD security automation.

Blueprint for Hardening Microsoft Exchange Servers

🔒 CISA, the NSA, and international partners released the Microsoft Exchange Server Security Best Practices blueprint to help administrators of on‑premises and hybrid Exchange environments strengthen defenses against persistent cyber threats. The guidance builds on CISA’s Emergency Directive 25‑02 and emphasizes restricting administrative access, implementing multifactor authentication, enforcing strict transport security, and adopting zero trust principles. It also urges organizations to remediate or replace end‑of‑life Exchange versions, apply recommended mitigations, and consider migrating to cloud-based email to reduce operational complexity and exposure.

Preparing for the Digital Battlefield of Identity Risk

🔒 BeyondTrust's 2026 predictions argue that the next major breaches will stem from unmanaged identity debt rather than simple phishing. The report highlights three identity-driven threats: agentic AI acting as privileged deputies vulnerable to prompt manipulation, automated "account poisoning" in financial systems, and long-dormant "ghost" identities surfacing in legacy IAM. The authors recommend an identity-first posture with strict least-privilege, context-aware controls, real-time auditing, and stronger identity governance.

Top IAM Vendors for Zero Trust and Identity Security

🔑 Identity is becoming the new perimeter as organizations accelerate the move to Zero Trust, making robust Identity & Access Management essential for secure access and continuity. This roundup examines leading IAM vendors and highlights capabilities in IGA, PAM, IDaaS, CIEM and risk-based authentication. Profiles cover strengths, pricing and integration trade-offs for vendors including CyberArk, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, SailPoint, Avatier and BeyondTrust to help CISOs match products to requirements.

Why Threat Actors Succeed and How Defenders Respond

🔍 The Unit 42 2025 Incident Response analysis explains that attackers exploit complexity, visibility gaps and excessive trust to succeed against organizations of all sizes. The report notes almost a third of incidents were cloud-related, IAM failures appeared in 41% of cases and attackers often moved within an hour, causing outsized disruption and cost. The recommended response is to consolidate telemetry into an integrated platform like Cortex, extend protection into cloud with Cortex Cloud, secure browser activity with Prisma Browser, and engage Unit 42 for advisory and retainer services.

Amazon Connect Introduces Granular Recording Permissions

🔒 Amazon Connect now offers granular UI permissions for conversation recordings and transcripts, enabling administrators to control access to playback, copying and downloads separately. Administrators can allow users to listen to calls while preventing transcript copying, and set download rules that permit redacted recordings but block unredacted downloads. The capability supports complex scenarios where sensitive conversations remain redacted while other interactions remain fully available.

Four Bottlenecks Slowing Enterprise GenAI Adoption

🔒 Since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, enterprises have rapidly launched GenAI pilots but struggle to convert experimentation into measurable value — only 3 of 37 pilots succeed. The article identifies four critical bottlenecks: security & data privacy, observability, evaluation & migration readiness, and secure business integration. It recommends targeted controls such as confidential compute, fine‑grained agent permissions, distributed tracing and replay environments, continuous evaluation pipelines and dual‑run migrations, plus policy‑aware integrations and impact analytics to move pilots into reliable production.

CloudWatch Database Insights Adds Tag-Based Access Control

🔐 Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now supports tag-based access control for database-level and per-query metrics powered by RDS Performance Insights. Instance tags defined on RDS and Aurora are now automatically evaluated to authorize Performance Insights metrics, enabling IAM policies to use tag-based access conditions across logical groups of databases. This reduces manual, resource-level permission management and improves governance and security consistency. The feature is available in all AWS regions where Database Insights is offered.

Hardening Customer Support Tools to Prevent Lateral Attacks

🔐 Microsoft Deputy CISO Raji Dani outlines the importance of hardening customer support tools and identities to reduce the risk of lateral movement and data exposure. The post recommends dedicated, isolated support identities protected by Privileged Role MFA and strict device controls. It advocates case-based RBAC with just-in-time and just-enough access, minimizing service-to-service trust, and deploying robust telemetry to speed detection and response. These layered controls apply to in-house teams and third-party providers.

MAESTRO Framework: Securing Generative and Agentic AI

🔒 MAESTRO, introduced by the Cloud Security Alliance in 2025, is a layered framework to secure generative and agentic AI in regulated environments such as banking. It defines seven interdependent layers—from Foundation Models to the Agent Ecosystem—and prescribes minimum viable controls, operational responsibilities and observability practices to mitigate systemic risks. MAESTRO is intended to complement existing standards like MITRE, OWASP, NIST and ISO while focusing on outcomes and cross-agent interactions.

Amazon ECS: Run Firelens Logging Containers Non-Root

🔒 Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now lets you run Firelens containers as a non-root user by specifying a numeric user ID in the user field of your Task Definition. Running Firelens as non-root reduces the potential attack surface and helps meet security and compliance requirements, including checks surfaced by AWS Security Hub. This capability replaces the previous default of "user": "0" and is available in all AWS Regions. See the Firelens documentation for configuration details.

Capita Fined £14m Over 2023 Data Breach Failings, Remediated

🔒 The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed Capita will not appeal a £14m penalty for security failings that led to a March 2023 breach affecting nearly seven million people. The fine was reduced from an initial £45m after the ICO considered post-incident remediation, support to affected individuals and engagement with the NCSC. The regulator cited delayed SOC response, absence of a tiered privileged-access model and siloed pen testing that allowed a threat actor linked to Black Basta to escalate privileges and deploy ransomware.

When Agentic AI Joins Teams: Hidden Security Shifts

🤖 Organizations are rapidly adopting agentic AI that does more than suggest actions—it opens tickets, calls APIs, and even remediates incidents autonomously. These agents differ from traditional Non-Human Identities because they reason, chain steps, and adapt across systems, making attribution and oversight harder. The author from Token Security recommends named ownership, on‑behalf tracing, and conservative, time‑limited permissions to curb shadow AI risks.

Strengthening Access Controls to Prevent Ransomware

🔐 Ransomware intrusions increasingly begin with compromised identities: recent analyses attribute roughly three quarters of incidents to stolen or misused credentials. Defenses must shift from infrastructure-centric controls to identity-first models like Zero Trust, combining RBAC, MFA and context-aware authentication. Adaptive, risk-based access and passwordless methods reduce friction while improving detection and auditability. Regulatory regimes such as NIS2 and DORA further mandate auditable access controls.