Remediant wants to move beyond PAM to secure enterprise networks

Security software provider Remediant wants to move beyond basic privileged access management (PAM) to help CSOs secure enterprise networks.

It’s adopting a new approach it calls PAM+, aimed at helping enterprises protecting access to their systems and build on Zero Trust initiatives.

Tim Keeler, CTO and co-founder of Remediant, set out the need for the new strategy: “Organizations’ inability to properly manage identities and privileges across the enterprise has left a large number of attack surfaces unprotected and vulnerable to cyberattacks that result in ransomware. A majority of today’s cybercriminals are able to accomplish their mission by leveraging privilege (or admin) account sprawl — a very large and highly exploited attack surface.” 

Nearly 80% of today’s cyberattacks involve leveraging privileged identities, he said.

Remediant has been working on PAM+ with its agentless SecureONE product. It said it has doubled its deployments of SecureOne over the last twelve months, with 75% of these deployments delivering on functionality promised by legacy PAM vendors that were never met. 

Keeler said Remediant’s PAM+ strategy was created to help negate password and other credential-based compromises, protect access and accelerate Zero Trust initiatives. “PAM+, as well as SecureONE, goes beyond legacy PAM approaches to address these risks — regardless of size, architecture model or vendor ecosystem. It also maintains a Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP),” he said. 

Zero Standing Privilege

ZSP, a term coined by Gartner, removes the typical, 24×7 admin authorization and protects admin authorization and organizations against the discovery of admin credentials, hashes or secrets from inside the network, even if the attacker has gained a foothold with weak passwords. 

“ZSP protects organizations by reducing the attack surface and is the most critical and proactive cybersecurity measure an organization can do to mitigate threats,” said Keeler. 

Remediant said its newly launched PAM+ strategy offers six capabilities that differentiate it from legacy PAM. It does away with the always-on, always-available privilege access, eliminates the impact of compromised admin credentials, renders password-stealing malware ineffective, routes all administrative access with multi-factor authentication, radically improves IAM/PAM program maturity by protecting access, and delivers rapid time-to-value: agentless, with integration into IT and security workflows, the company said. 

“Privilege sprawl and credential misuse is a factor in nearly every cyberattack, so much so that both are being specifically identified as reasons for rapidly increasing cyber insurance premiums,” Raj Dodhiawala, president and CEO of Remediant, said in the statement. 

“The innovative PAM+ strategy promises to disrupt the stagnant PAM solutions market and truly solve today’s operational and cybersecurity pains. Remediant is laser-focused on protecting access, thereby preventing lateral movement for every customer — regardless of size, architecture model or vendor ecosystem,” the recently promoted CEO added. 

Increasing lateral movement attacks

In lateral movement attacks, once an attacker is inside any infrastructure or system, they elevate privileges and move laterally to find the organization’s crown jewels (for example, the active directory, where all credentials are stored). Once this is done, attackers can encrypt data, execute a ransomware attack and much more.

According to the Global Incident Response Threat Report by VMware, 25% of respondents witnessed instances of lateral movement in the past year. One in every 10 respondents reported that lateral movement was present in more than half of their engagements. Telemetry from Threat intelligence cloud VMware Contexa found that in April and May of this year, almost half of all intrusions included a lateral movement event.