Securing Remote Access: Best Practices for Third-Party Risk Management

Remote Access: A Longstanding Necessity

The physical location of users has become less and less important in conducting business, with the drawback that it creates new, persistent threats to organizations. You know that. You may not know that remote access to IT and business-critical systems is not a new concept. It’s been around since the late 1980s.

Since its inception, IT professionals, remote engineers and third parties have widely used remote access to computers and servers through protocols like Telnet, remote desk protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH) to maintain infrastructure worldwide. However, this flexibility brings significant risks for organizations without security programs beyond a traditional perimeter-based model.

Addressing the Evolving Threat Landscape

Today’s interconnected world makes remote access essential for IT, cloud and digital transformation initiatives, operational technology (OT) and accessing industrial control systems (ICS). The increasing use of remote access heightens security risks for organizations and expands the threat landscape beyond traditional secured walls. The proverbial “keys to the kingdom” have evolved from built-in admin accounts to over-permissioned access and roles to cloud services, creating more blind spots for security teams. Organizations rely heavily on third-party services to conduct business, and in 2023, third-party attack vectors caused almost 29% of breaches.

Furthermore, the CyberArk 2024 Identity Security Threat Landscape Report found that 94% of respondents use more than 10 vendors for identity-related cybersecurity initiatives—organizations find themselves tangled in a fishing line of multiple systems, applications and services across different platforms and locations. Beyond vulnerabilities to critical systems, respondents voiced concern about the lack of adequate session management, isolation and visibility.

The takeaway? It’s essential to reduce risk when you don’t know who’s behind the keyboard.

Mastering Third-Party Risk Management

Third-party risk management (TPRM) is critical to an organization’s overall risk management strategy. It focuses on identifying, assessing and mitigating risks associated with external vendors, suppliers and partners. As organizations increasingly rely on third parties for various services and functions, managing the related risks becomes paramount. Secure remote access is a crucial aspect of TPRM, as it directly impacts the security of an organization’s data and systems when accessed by external parties.

Implementing Best Practices to Help Secure Remote Access

While there is no “silver bullet solution” for securing and reducing risk for third parties, contractors and vendors, these six best practices can help secure remote access:

1. Extend your privileged access management (PAM) program for all users and identities requiring business-critical systems access. Enable session isolation, monitoring and recording with robust logging and auditing capabilities.
2. Implement secure remote access solutions in addition to your PAM program while enforcing MFA everywhere and the principle of least privilege (PoLP).
3. Conduct thorough vendor risk assessments before engaging and onboarding with specific access control policies. This includes evaluating fourth-party relationships and reviewing SOC reports and security questionnaires. Automating vendor provisioning is also crucial to alleviating administrative headaches and, more importantly, saving time.
4. Automate and implement just-in-time (JIT) access and work toward zero standing privileges (ZSP) in addition to utilizing a PAM solution for users accessing shared credentials or roles.
5. Seek an agent-less, VPN-less and passwordless solution that does not require adding external users to a directory service to reduce administrative overhead. Identity management schemes based on user IDs and passwords are impractical for frequently changing third-party access requirements and introduce additional security flaws and potential credential theft.
6. Regularly review and update vendor access policies while continuously monitoring the program to accommodate new and persistent threats. This activity includes defining offboarding procedures, account or role retention policies, user data destruction terms and reporting processes to comply with regulations and cyber insurance policies.

Securing the Future with Effective TPRM

This approach to TPRM helps organizations effectively mitigate risks associated with external vendors and contractors securing remote access while maintaining operational efficiency and compliance requirements. Cyberattacks can be catastrophic and long-lasting. Building a PAM program to secure third-party remote access should be a key priority for any organization’s cybersecurity model.

To dive into the modern approach to securing remote access and managing third-party risks, check out the CyberArk webinar, “Secure Your Vendor’s Access from Attacks on Third-party Vulnerabilities.” This session provides valuable insights and practical strategies to help enhance your organization’s security posture for all human and non-human identities.

Ryne Laster is a product marketing manager at CyberArk.