What Is Unauthorized Access? Top 8 Practices for Detecting and Responding to It

Unauthorized access continues to be one of the biggest cybersecurity problems for organizations of all sizes. Its consequences can be severe, ranging from data breaches and financial losses to reputational damage and lawsuits. Therefore, it’s critical for organizations to establish a robust cybersecurity strategy and implement best practices to effectively detect and respond to unauthorized access.

In this article, we reveal the unauthorized access meaning, explore the dangers behind it, and learn the key attack vectors. We also discuss how to detect unauthorized access and offer the top eight cybersecurity practices to help your organization fortify defenses.

What is unauthorized access? Risks and consequences

Unauthorized access in cybersecurity occurs when “a person gains logical or physical access without permission to a network, system, application, data, or other resource,” according to NIST. Unauthorized access involves bypassing security measures or exploiting vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure to get access to systems that should be accessible only to authorized users. Unauthorized access involves bypassing security measures or exploiting vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure to entry systems that should be accessible only to authorized users. 

If your organization suffers from an unauthorized access attack, the consequences can range from a data breach and financial losses to service unavailability or even losing control of the entire network. Let’s look at a few notable unauthorized access examples. 

Case#1: Dropbox Sign data breach

Case#2: Bank of America data breach 

Both of these breaches could have been prevented and mitigated through regular insider threat risk assessments and a comprehensive incident response plan.

Unfortunately, these cases are only the tip of the iceberg. The cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, with cybercriminals using new and sophisticated methods to gain illegal access. Not only does unauthorized access continue to be the leading cause of breaches for the fourth consecutive year, but its prevalence among all causes is trending upwards.

Cybercriminals often remain hidden on a network for a long time and even use anti-forensic techniques to hide their footprints. The Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 by IBM claims that it takes 277 days on average to identify and contain a data breach. The earlier you can identify a data breach, the less it’ll cost your organization.

Besides financial losses, unauthorized use of information can cause damage to an organization in a number of other ways. Unauthorized users can compromise your financial data, trade secrets, personal information, and other sensitive data, which may lead to identity theft, reputational damage, and legal consequences. Unauthorized access can also result in system downtime, loss of productivity, and disruption of critical services of your organization.

From all this, it’s easy to conclude that organizations should detect and respond to unauthorized access as quickly as possible to remediate threats before severe damage occurs. And to detect unauthorized access to data, you need to understand how malicious actors can intrude into your systems. Below, you can check out the most common attack vectors.

Common attack vectors for gaining unauthorized access 

There are several common scenarios of gaining unauthorized access, from hacking weak passwords to sophisticated social engineering schemes like phishing. 

• Password guessing. Cybercriminals often employ special software to automate the guessing process by targeting information such as usernames, passwords, and PINs.
• Exploiting software vulnerabilities. Cyberattackers can exploit software flaws and vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to applications, networks, and operating systems. 
• Social engineering. Social engineering tactics rely on psychological manipulation to trick users into clicking malicious links, pop-ups on websites, or attachments in emails. Phishing, smishing, spear phishing, and impersonation are the most common techniques to deceive employees into revealing credentials.
• Exploiting third-party vendors’ vulnerabilities. Some third-party vendors, suppliers, and partners may have access to your systems. Hackers may exploit vulnerabilities in a vendor’s IT infrastructure, compromise a vendor’s privileged accounts, or employ other techniques to bypass your organization’s security controls.
• Credential stuffing. Attackers can target an easily exploitable system, infiltrate it, and use the stolen credentials to access other more robust systems. These attackers often take advantage of people who tend to reuse their passwords for multiple accounts.

How to respond to unauthorized access? Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to detecting and responding to all types of unauthorized access attacks. The response largely depends on what assets are accessed, who accesses them, and what happens next.

A strong cybersecurity strategy is key to preventing unauthorized access, responding to its detection, and quickly mitigating damage.

How to prevent unauthorized access: 8 best practices to use

Ensuring all-around security against unauthorized access involves a combination of proactive measures and responsive actions. By implementing the following best practices, you can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access and strengthen your overall security posture.

Here is a list of best cybersecurity practices and techniques for preventing and detecting unauthorized access incidents.

1. Adopt the principle of least privilege

The principle of least privilege calls for establishing user access review procedures and regularly checking user privileges to ensure that users have minimal access to sensitive data and critical systems. Consider giving your employees just enough access privileges to perform their core responsibilities. With that, you can implement a just-in-time approach to grant them temporary additional access when needed. You can also aligns your access management with continuous adaptive trust principles, dynamically adjusting user permissions based on risk and context.

2. Implement a strong password management policy

Consider implementing a strong password management policy that will help you with creating, managing, and safeguarding user credentials. The right policy can also help you to adopt healthy password habits and maintain adequate password complexity, length, and uniqueness, as well as to regularly rotate passwords. For example, you can stick to HIPAA, NIST, or PCI DSS compliance password policy depending on the industry your organization operates in.

Furthermore, a password management policy should outline the individuals or roles accountable for generating and overseeing user passwords within your organization. By adhering to a well-defined policy, your organization can enhance its overall password security and reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

3. Use multi-factor authentication

Along with protecting your passwords, the next big step to protect your accounts is to apply multi-factor authentication (MFA). Unauthorized access frequently occurs due to the exploitation of a single compromised account or user credentials.  Enforcing multi-factor authentication, though, can effectively stop such unauthorized access attempts. Requiring an additional identity verification step, such as sending a one-time passcode to a user’s mobile device, will prevent unauthorized actors from proceeding. 

CISA emphasizes that MFA is a simple way to protect your organization against account compromise attacks. According to Microsoft, adopting MFA can prevent approximately 99.9% of account compromise cases, significantly bolstering security measures against unauthorized access.

4. Monitor user activity

Monitoring user activity can help you detect and prevent unauthorized access, insider threats, and potential security breaches. By monitoring who does what in your organization’s IT infrastructure, you’ll be able to quickly detect signs of unauthorized activity. That’s why it’s crucial to set up a comprehensive user activity monitoring (UAM) solution that can capture and analyze user activity within your system. 

UAM solutions typically provide lots of different features. We recommend choosing session recording software that enables monitoring of log files, system events, network traffic, and other user activity to help you identify any unusual or suspicious patterns that may indicate unauthorized access or other cybersecurity incidents.

5. Maintain secure IT infrastructure

To enhance protection against unauthorized access, combine your monitoring software with a resilient firewall. Whereas monitoring software can detect insider threats in real time, a firewall can serve as a protective barrier, shielding networks, web applications, databases, and critical systems from unauthorized intrusions.

It’s also critical for organizations to conduct regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing of corporate IT infrastructure. One of the most neglected security threats is failing to update protection systems promptly.

The 2023 MOVEit transfer data breach, during which the data of multiple global organizations was compromised, is a telling example of how system vulnerabilities can lead to catastrophic consequences. Cybercriminals exploited a critical zero-day vulnerability in MOVEit systems and compromised data from more than 2,500 organizations, which affected approximately 60-65 million individuals.

6. Employ user behavior analytics

Consider implementing user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) to analyze user activity patterns, access logs, and behavior profiles. By establishing a baseline of normal user behavior, UEBA tools automatically identify anomalies that may indicate unauthorized access, malicious activity, and account compromise.

For example, if a user suddenly logs in to a system at an unusual time or from an unknown device, UEBA tools may notify your security officers. The security team can then investigate the issue and respond quickly. 

7. Promptly respond to cybersecurity incidents

Your security team needs to respond to security alerts immediately. For example, if you detect suspicious login attempts from an account, your security officers should be able to revoke account access immediately and block the session to prevent an intrusion.

Ideally, you should also have a well-structured incident response plan outlining the responsibilities of your incident response team and providing clear steps to follow in case of an unauthorized access attempt or a security incident.

8. Conduct security awareness training

As attackers frequently target people rather than machines, you should shift from a technology-centric to a people-centric cybersecurity approach and make your employees your first line of defense. For this, regularly conduct security awareness training to keep employees up-to-date with the latest cybersecurity threats and educate them about security best practices, including how to identify suspicious activities.

How can Syteca help to mitigate risks of unauthorized access?

Syteca is a comprehensive software solution for detecting and preventing unauthorized access. It’s an insider risk management platform that focuses on monitoring user activity, managing user access, and responding to incidents. Syteca provides valuable insights into user actions and helps you maintain a secure IT environment. Here is how.

User activity monitoring. Syteca provides real-time monitoring and recording of user activity across your organization’s endpoints, servers, and network devices. Records are supplemented with informative metadata such as typed keystrokes, opened applications, and visited URLs. Such user session records can serve as evidence for security incident investigations.

Privileged access management. Syteca’s access management capabilities allow you to provide the appropriate level of access permissions for different roles and groups of privileged users. Syteca also ensures enhanced credential protection thanks to its comprehensive password management functionality.

Two-factor authentication. Leverage Syteca’s two-factor authentication feature to make sure that your users are who they claim to be. This extra layer of protection will help you secure your critical user accounts, preventing cases of unauthorized access.

User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). Syteca has a built-in AI-powered UEBA module to establish a baseline of normal user behavior and automatically detect deviations from usual patterns. For example, Syteca identifies user logins at unusual hours.

Real-time alerts and incident response. Syteca allows you to receive real-time user activity notifications based on default and custom security alert rules. You can configure Syteca to send notifications once an alert is triggered or perform automatic response actions: block the user, kill the process, and display a warning message. Your security officers can also perform these actions manually.

Auditing and reporting. Syteca’s reporting and statistics capabilities enable your security team to generate comprehensive reports based on information collected from user sessions. These reports can help you conveniently analyze user activity, conduct audits, and investigate security incidents. You can customize any report to meet your specific needs.

Moreover, Syteca offers automatic updates on all endpoints. By default, the software will be updated automatically on all endpoints after your security team downloads and runs the newest version of Syteca. This way, you won’t have issues with outdated and vulnerable software.

Conclusion

Unauthorized access incidents may not only be disruptive and costly for your organization; they can also affect customer trust, damage your company’s reputation, and lead to fines for non-compliance. Implementing the best practices described in this article will help you prevent, detect, and swiftly respond to unauthorized access cases. 

By deploying Syteca in your organization, you’ll get even more visibility into user activity and enhance your access management. With a robust set of features, Syteca can help you quickly detect and respond to insider threats and unauthorized access attempts.