Are you getting ready for the upcoming Black Hat USA 2023 event, an internationally recognized cybersecurity event providing the most technical and relevant information security research, now in its 26th year.  The event is quickly approaching, taking place August 5-10, 2023, returning to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, NV with a 6-day program. 

Ahead of the show, VMblog received an exclusive interview with Alex Leemon, Director of Product Marketing at BeyondTrust, a leader in intelligent identity and access security.  Make sure to add them to your MUST SEE list.

VMblog:  Before we get into it, can you give us a quick overview of the company?  What should folks know?

Alex Leemon:  BeyondTrust fights every day to secure identities, intelligently remediate threats, and deliver dynamic access to empower and protect organizations around the world. As the leader in Intelligent Identity and Access Security, our vision is a world where all identities and access are protected from cyber threats.

VMblog:  You are sponsoring the upcoming Black Hat USA event.  How can attendees find you at the show?  Does your booth have a theme?  How many folks are you sending? 

Leemon:  The BeyondTrust booth is #2434. We're a 20x20 island located in the heart of the business hall. We will be featuring our BeyondTrust Trusted Protector cartoon series-learn more at www.beyondtrust.com/toons - and we have about 15 BeyondTrust experts that will be onsite to support and interact with Black Hat attendees.

VMblog:  Is this your first time sponsoring Black Hat?  If not, how many times have you sponsored it before?  And, what keeps you coming back?

Leemon:  BeyondTrust has sponsored Black Hat for many years. Getting to engage with the attendees, hearing from industry experts and partnering with our channel partners on exciting events are what keep us coming back!

VMblog:  What is your message to Black Hat attendees coming out to the show this year?

Leemon:  As the technology landscape continues to evolve, the proliferation of cybersecurity threats is inevitable. Threat actors and threat vectors will continue to climb-and we'll continue to offer our insights and defense tactics. Today, identities are the most prevalent threat vector, and the BeyondTrust team will be a part of the 2023 event to share our knowledge and experience of how we are continuing to help customers with their Intelligent Identity and Access Security needs.

Come meet the team to learn how our customers are leveraging BeyondTrust solutions to achieve zero trust initiatives and reduce their threat surface. We invite you into our booth #2434 for a unique interactive experience to help you learn what your security weapon of choice will be! While there, don't forget to lasso up a pair of stylish custom socks to take home with you!

VMblog:  The show is focused on cybersecurity.  What specific problems is your company and technology addressing?

Leemon:  Organizations are facing a rapidly and drastically shifting cybersecurity landscape. The perimeter is no longer, and identity has become everything. Currently, compromised identities are the most common cause of breaches-approximately 89% of organizations have been impacted by identity-based attacks in the past two years-and cyber threats targeting identities and credentials are only escalating in number and complexity. This is compounded by the fact that identities are surging. Work-from-anywhere, the proliferation of cloud, and cloud-first and rapid development initiatives are generating many more identities-human and machine-across the organization. All of these identities must be identified, onboarded, secured, and managed; yet, the reality is that this surge in the number of identities is frequently coupled with a lack of visibility into the depth and breadth of permissions given to these accounts. Tracking cloud-access entitlements is already difficult. Many of the cloud providers' native tools still are opaque and lack cross-platform visibility, making it difficult to assess the true effect of the combination of entitlements. Further, it is much easier to over-entitle an identity and their accounts during account creation time. This naturally leads to more entitlements than are required for the work, and this is a threat vector for malicious actors.

The enormous lack of visibility into identity security risks requires a market shift from a focus on prevention to one of visualization, proactive detection, and intelligent threat response.

BeyondTrust is focused on closing the gaps that perpetuate identity security risks by creating a visibility layer. Our new Identity Security Insights solution harnesses advanced analytics to ensure better visibility over all identities and privileges. This first-of-its-kind solution brings unprecedented visibility to customers, so they can identify and mitigate issues they could not see before. Insights adds a new intelligence layer to our portfolio, giving out customers significantly more value from their PAM investments.

VMblog:  Is your company launching anything new at the show?  Can you give us a sneak peek?

Leemon:  Identity Security Insights, sitting at the heart of the BeyondTrust's Privileged Access Management platform, will be newly launched for general availability, just in time for Black Hat!

Identity Security Insights gives organizations a powerful, game-changing layer of centralized visibility into all the identities, accounts, cloud entitlements and privileged access across their IT estate to help organization understand, monitor, and harden their identity security posture in the face of hybrid threats.

Identity Security Insights also leverages actionable analytics and threat intelligence to detect potential misuse and in-progress attacks. It will correlate data from BeyondTrust solutions and third-party tools, such as Okta, Ping Identity and Azure Active Directory to make proactive recommendations on how to reduce their identity attack surface and proactively reduce risk.

No other vendor provides the comprehensive visibility and intelligent recommendations to help customers improve their identity security posture.

If you want to learn more about Identity Security Insights and how BeyondTrust is bringing active threat detection to Privileged Access Management (PAM), visit our website-or contact us to get set up with our free trial.

VMblog: What are some of the key takeaways of your solution that Black Hat attendees should be aware of? 

Leemon:  Identity Security Insights is currently the only solution that is able to provide:

• Real-time visualization of all identities, accounts, cloud entitlements, and privileged access across the entire IT estate that is unrivaled by any other vendor.
• Intelligent threat detection capabilities and illumination of potential attack paths and identities already compromised, under attack, or at high risk of compromise.
• Smart, actionable recommendations that empower users to shrink their attack surface and improve security hygiene, including recommendations for the rightsizing of access privileges.
• Integration with products they already own, leveraging security investments.
• A single, unified interface that extracts and correlates data and intelligent insights from multiple solutions.
• The ability to onboard the entire IT infrastructure in under 30 minutes and provide valuable findings the same day.
• Identity visibility into dormant accounts, data leakage, absent MFA controls, Okta session hijacking, overprivileged accounts, and more that organizations currently don't have access to.
  

VMblog:  The market is a crowded space.  What is it about your company and technology that sets you apart from the competition?  What are your differentiators?

Leemon:  

• BeyondTrust is leading the charge in innovating identity-first security. We are the only identity security platform that allows you to detect identity-based threats and respond by controlling privileges, access, credentials, and secrets.
• Modernization of Privileged Access Management. We've evolved our PAM platform to go beyond preventative privilege management to find and stop threats in real-time.
• An Exceptional Customer Experience. At BeyondTrust, it's really about how we put the customer first. How everything we are trying to solve and think about, we really are fighting for our customers and helping them achieve their cybersecurity goals. We also want it to be simple to use our products and interact with us, and we are proud of our industry-leading customer satisfaction scores.
• Integrations and partnerships. We are experts in our products, but our partners have vast industry, regional, and technical knowledge that can bring value to our customers by supporting adoption or managing platforms. Additionally, our technology alliance partners enable integrations that unlock advanced inter product use cases and workflows and improve productivity and efficiency. 
  

VMblog:  What are some of the top priorities you believe attendees at Black Hat should be considering for 2023/2024?

Leemon:  

• Cloud entitlements - how to innovate just-in-time access from a cloud perspective and how identities are passed between cloud and on-prem (hybrid threats)
  

• Identity-threat detection - organizations realize that preventative security controls are no longer enough on their own to protect them from the threats posed on digital identities. Security professionals are seeking to also adopt solutions that can detect identity-based anomalies and guide them in their remediation. A combination of prevention and detection capabilities can help organizations achieve a stronger security posture than prevention alone.
  

• Just-in-time access
  

VMblog:  What are some of the security best practices you would deem critical?

Leemon:  1) Centralize Data Around Identity - have a single place to model roles, policies, privileges, and risk. A foundation built on identity provides a unified approach to manage privileges, entitlements, and access across the organization.

2) Ensure Identity Provider (IdP) Accounts Are Managed by a Privileged Credential Solution - Leaving unmanaged privileged accounts in your environments equates to bad password hygiene, which then leads to incorrect configurations and potential security blind spots. A privileged credential management solution is central to controlling access by privileged identities, and it works with identity providers such as Azure AD and Okta. But it won't be effective if you haven't set it up correctly, or if you aren't managing all your privileged accounts with it.

3) Analyze IAM And PAM Signals - Keep on the lookout for: Partially Disabled Identities and Orphaned Accounts; Entitlement Creep, which can occur when an employee slowly accrues additional permissions by virtue of getting promoted, or through the projects with which they become associated; Dormant accounts, especially if a dormant account suddenly becomes active

4) Reveal Vulnerabilities Where There Is Inadequate MFA - Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is one of today's most effective security hygiene practices. However, MFA is not without its challenges, which include lack of employee compliance, misconfigurations, and weak MFA, to

5) Detect Mismatches in Identity Security - Security teams should seek to prevent the creation of an employee account associated with a personal email address. If a personal email address becomes compromised and the employee locked out, company assets or information could be at risk. Unfortunately, this scenario is difficult to detect.

VMblog:  If you were presenting on the keynote stage, what trends do you see that companies should be paying special attention to in 2023 and beyond?

Leemon:  

• The number of identities is surging
• Tracking cloud-access entitlements is becoming increasingly important. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2023, 75% of cloud security failures will result from inadequate management of identities, access, and privileges, up from 50% in 2020
• There is a significant lack of visibility into the depth and breadth of permissions given to accounts and identities are consistently being over-entitled-this is a significant threat vector for malicious actors
• Hybrid threats are on the rise
• Invest in identity threat detection technologies, to complement their prevention efforts
  

VMblog:  Is your company giving away any interesting tchotchke at your booth?  What is it?

Leemon:  We invite attendees into our booth for a live interactive experience, where they will be featured in a cartoon they can share with colleagues and on social media. If they participate, they will get a custom pair of Buster (from the Trusted protector series) socks!

VMblog:  Is your company involved in any parties during the event?

Leemon:  We are sponsors of the Optiv Blackhat After party.

VMblog:  As a show sponsor, do you have any tips for attendees to better prepare for the conference?

Leemon:  Make a plan and be ready to get your steps in!

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