Privileged access rights are the gateway to critical systems and data. Providing users with elevated privileges is a standard practice, as employees sometimes need access to sensitive data to perform their jobs. At the same time, there’s always a risk of privilege misuse with the aim of industrial espionage or cyberattacks.

High employee productivity is vital for your business’s success. Yet only 34% of US employees are engaged with their work (and 13% are actively disengaged) according to a 2018 poll by Gallup. But the productivity of even the most engaged employees tends to decrease over time. Workers require constant support to stay productive. This is especially important when dealing with remote employees, as they aren’t within their manager’s eyesight and have lots of domestic distractions.

Monitoring employees is one way to ensure a productive and secure workflow within an organization. However, not all employees like being watched. Some even challenge the ethics and legality of workplace surveillance. In this article, we explore the nature of workplace surveillance and consider the laws US employers should know and follow if they want to monitor their employees.

Privileged access is granted to certain users so they can perform their work. Yet admin and service accounts often are the causes of cybersecurity incidents since they allow their owners to install and remove software, modify system configurations, and more. Even with privileged access management practices in place, malicious actors can continue to find new ways to compromise your sensitive data. However, a new just-in-time PAM approach promises to improve the situation.

People tend to trust those they work with: employees, business partners, subcontractors. But these people, who have access to all kinds of corporate data, don’t always prove worthy of such trust. Insider data theft statistics show that one in four employees won’t think twice before stealing sensitive data from their current company if it will help them sign a contract with a competitor.

With the number of insider-related breaches rising every year, employee monitoring is becoming a common practice. Modern employee monitoring solutions help businesses track their employees’ productivity and work attendance, minimize administrative work, and enhance cybersecurity. In this article, we discuss why you should monitor your office staff, list the benefits and shortcomings of doing so, and explore best practices for monitoring your employees efficiently yet respectfully.

Cybersecurity specialists treat remote employees as a threat, and they’re right to do so. However, remote work isn’t a temporary trend — it’s here to stay. Between 2017 and 2018, 36 million (or 25%) of US employees sometimes worked at home according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. For lots of specialists, the ability to work outside the office is an important benefit when choosing an employer.

Privileged passwords should be used wisely. These credentials, also called secrets, provide a user with access to protected accounts, systems, networking hardware, cloud instances, and applications. Since privileged accounts also have elevated permissions, passwords to these accounts are often targeted by cybercriminals. In fact, weak, reused, and compromised passwords are the cause of 81% of all data breaches according to the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report.

Insider threat protection is an essential activity for government institutions — and especially for national defense organizations. Although cybersecurity in branches of the armed forces is expected to be robust, it still may have flaws. A 2019 report by the Identity Theft Resource Center shows that there were 2,252,439 sensitive records exposed in the government/military sector in 2019.

Today’s banks and financial institutions closely cooperate with various third-party vendors. While such cooperation brings a lot of benefits, it also raises some significant concerns regarding the security of the data and resources these vendors have access to. In fact, according to Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, the financial sector is among the most targeted, accounting for about 10% of all data breaches across all industries in 2018.