Accountability is not a bad word! It goes hand in hand with PAM security—no matter what vertical or size of an organization. Every privileged account needs to be secured.
Session recording provides the visibility and accountability to keep users and organizations protected while shining a light on nefarious acts within privileged accounts—even if that is a legit user. Privileged session recordings allow people to view sessions in real-time and review previous sessions to examine the why, the who, and the how privileged accounts were accessed.
First, let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same idea here.
Session monitoring and recording is a feature of a PAM solution that allows organizations to monitor and record the activities of privileged users. Specifically, users who have privileges to access business-critical sensitive systems and data. This ensures that privileged users are not misusing their access or that bad actors are not working in the dark attempting to compromise the system’s security.
Session monitoring and recording tracks and records the actions of privileged users accessing a specific privileged account. This includes logging keystrokes, capturing screen activity, recording file transfers, and system configuration changes.
Let’s take it one step further.
If a privileged user launches an application locally, the session recording will capture whatever the user accesses, providing you with a viewable recording of the user’s session activities. These session recordings are auditable, meaning a session recording can be reviewed and connected to a user, accessed accounts, and what the user did during the session. It’s important to note that video recording is the critical component here.
Capturing keystrokes during session recording in locally accessed applications should be done with caution because you risk recording keystrokes not intended for that session which could be a liability.
If a privileged user accesses an application using an SSH proxy or RDP proxy, the session recording captures the screen activity in real-time, along with keystrokes. Keystrokes are captured in this use case as proxy access ensures that all activity is specific to actions on that privileged account.
Please note that with any session monitoring and recording feature, you should be able to customize what you capture. It is critical that session recording features can be customized to meet an organization’s specific needs, such as by enabling or disabling certain types of data capture. For example, disabling keystroke capture for specific sensitive applications.
There are options when it comes to capturing activity by privileged users who access business-critical systems and data. Each option comes with advantages and disadvantages.
The session data from any of the above methods is typically stored in an audit log, which can be reviewed and analyzed to identify any suspicious or unauthorized activity. It offers accountability for each user on each session and protection for the user and the organization.
Session monitoring and recording can also help organizations comply with regulatory requirements, improve security, and reduce the risk of data loss or security breaches. It can also be used to troubleshoot issues, perform incident response, and support compliance reporting.
It's critical to understand that recording everything is not best practice. Those who have experienced a compromise may think recording everything is the best approach, but doing so would create an unmanageable amount of recorded data to comb through. Storage and labor costs to review all this data would not be feasible for most organizations.
Session recording has several benefits that far outweigh any cons when recording privileged sessions.
Although the benefits of privileged session recording outweigh the negatives, it's important to note them.
While privileged session recording can provide valuable benefits in terms of security, compliance, and risk reduction, making it much more beneficial for the user and the organization, it’s important for organizations to carefully consider both pros and cons when implementing and maintaining a session recording system.
Here are best practices that can offer guidance in recording and monitoring privileged sessions:
Overall, session monitoring and recording gives organizations visibility and accountability into the actions taken by privileged users in privileged accounts. This helps improve security, compliance, and operational efficiency. An organization should provide training and guidance to privileged users on how to use their privileges responsibly with established policies and procedures to support privileged account use.
Risks from bad actors are constant- session monitoring and recording features are valuable in the fight to mitigate risk. To learn more about session monitoring and recording Delinea offers, click here.