BeyondTrust Survey Reveals Privileged Users Are Out Of Control

PRESS RELEASE

San Diego, CA, October 22, 2013 – BeyondTrust, the security industry's only provider of Context-Aware Security Intelligence, today announced the results of its recently concluded survey, Privilege Gone Wild that reveals employees are granted excessive privileges and access for their particular roles resulting in unnecessary risks to organizations. In its entirety, the survey highlights the significant industry challenge associated with proper identity and privilege management.

One of the most startling statistics from this survey reveals that 28% of respondents admitted to having retrieved information not relevant to their job. When asked what information was accessed, nearly one-quarter identified financial reports and almost half provided written responses specifying salary details, HR data and personnel documents, etc. To illustrate just how serious of an issue this is for organizations, one IT employee at a large, well-known critical infrastructure provider admitted to having retrieved financial reports while another IT employee at well well-known professional services firm admitted to retrieving R&D plans, neither of which was relevant to their jobs.

The survey also revealed two-thirds have controls in place to monitor privilege access yet 54% of those respondents stated that they could circumvent those controls. This statistic illustrates that while current solutions are in place to detect privileged abuse, they're easily defeated by the average end user.

"Allowing any employee unfettered access to non-essential company data is both unnecessary and dangerous and should be an issue that is resolved quickly," said Brad Hibbert, EVP of product strategy at BeyondTrust. "The insider threat has always been a vulnerability we take very seriously at BeyondTrust and it's our goal to help customers combat this growing problem."

Additional key survey takeaways:

44% of employees have access rights that are not necessary to their current role

80% of respondents believe that it's at least somewhat likely that employees access sensitive or confidential data out of curiosity

Over three-quarters of respondents say the risk to their organization caused by the insecurity of privileged users will increase over the next few years

Customer information is considered most likely at risk if there's a lack of proper access controls over privileged users

To read more findings from the Privilege Gone Wild survey, please visit: http://www.beyondtrust.com/Content/images/Privilege-Gone-Wild.jpg

The survey reflects responses from 265 IT decision makers including security managers, and network and systems engineers across a number of industries including financial services, manufacturing, and government, among others.

About BeyondTrust

BeyondTrust is the only security solution vendor providing Context-Aware Security Intelligence, giving customers the visibility and controls necessary to reduce their IT security risks, while at the same time simplifying their compliance reporting.

BeyondTrust offers consistent policy-driven vulnerability and privilege management, role-based access control, monitoring, logging, auditing and reporting to protect internal assets from the inside out. The company's products empower IT governance to strengthen security, improve productivity, drive compliance, and reduce expense across physical, virtual, mobile and cloud environments.

With more than 25 years of global success, BeyondTrust is the pioneer of both Threat Management and Privileged Identity Management (PIM) solutions for heterogeneous IT environments. More than half of the companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rely on BeyondTrust to secure their enterprises. Customers include eight of the world's 10 largest banks, eight of the world's 10 largest aerospace and defense firms, and 7 of the 10 largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies, as well as renowned universities across the globe.

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