by JD Sherry, on May 03, 2019
For avid Game of Thrones* fans, Season 8’s third episode brought together a long-awaited clash of the White Walkers versus the living at the Stark’s castle in Winterfell. Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister worked to develop a strategy meant to protect Winterfell and the realm against the threat of the White Walkers and the Night King. Dragons, fortified armaments and the armies of the Unsullied and the Dothraki were all utilized as a part of their broader military strategy. All the while, Bran waited by the Weirwood tree for his ultimate showdown with darkness.
Even with all that planning, however, one area that wasn’t addressed was the crypts inside of Winterfell. With the Night King’s ability to raise the dead, the tombs inside of Winterfell became an unseen vulnerability for the living. Halfway through the episode, the Night King arrived and raised the dead, bringing to life all the dead buried inside the crypts. Meanwhile, the battle with the army of the dead raged outside the walls. What was deemed to be one of the safest places in Winterfell ended up being one of the most vulnerable in the Battle of the Long Night.
You might be asking yourself, “What does Game of Thrones have to do with privileged access management and data breaches?” When assessing an organization’s cybersecurity posture, privileged accounts are the most critical to safeguard because of their proverbial “keys to the kingdom.” Malicious digital insiders who are able to gain access to these privileged accounts are able to exploit them through lateral movement once inside the network. If attackers can get in through the interior of a network – much like the wights got in through the crypts – the lateral movement can be crippling to a network’s defenses, just like in the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Attackers can gain access to personal and sensitive data, putting millions of customers at risk, along with your brand’s reputation.
So what can you do to protect your network against the army of insider threats?
Remediant’s SecureONE helps you protect your organization’s ecosystems with a zero trust security model. Our Just In Time Administration + Principle of Least Privilege grants users access to only what they need – and only for the time they need it. To complete the zero trust model – Instant Breach Detection and Multi-Factor Authentication are integrated to deliver total privileged access security and mitigate the risk of account compromises by 99 percent. This is the true privileged access management solution that has been promised for ages but was yet to come to fruition. Until now.
To find out more about how Remediant and SecureONE can help your organization, click here.
“The Long Night.” Game of Thrones, written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and directed by Miguel Sapochnik, HBO, April 28, 2019.
Media via HBO