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BeyondTrust adds privilege management capabilities to Linux
Thu, 26th Jan 2023
FYI, this story is more than a year old

BeyondTrust, the intelligent identity and access security provider, has announced key enhancements to BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Unix and Linux and BeyondTrust Active Directory Bridge to help customers defend against growing Linux threats.

In 2022, 100% of the world's top 500 supercomputers and 96.3% of the world's top one million servers ran on Linux. As a result, Linux systems are not immune to cyberattacks and present high-value targets for external attackers and malicious insiders. In addition, they are widely used for critical business functions, resulting in a much more significant impact if successfully compromised.

Gaining root or other privileged credentials makes it easy for malicious actors to remain undetected while accessing sensitive systems and data. To protect against malicious activities, many enterprises use sudo (superuser do) to manage privileges in their Linux workstations. However, sudo lacks central storage and administration of policy files, secure and efficient ways to distribute policy files over multiple systems, native protection of the integrity of generated logs, and provision for remote login to remote servers. These severe limitations create security blind spots and decrease productivity and ease of management of Linux systems.

BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Unix and Linux enables admins to easily set up policies that allow and deny actions and use policy-based controls to elevate privileges as needed. In its latest release, the solution integrates natively with sudo via the Sudo Manager feature.

With this integration, users now have central storage and administration of sudoers policy files; a secure and efficient way of distributing sudoers policy files over multiple systems; native protection of the integrity of generated logs; provision for remote login to remote servers; centralised searching, analytics and reporting; and a web-based management platform.

The native integration gives customers unprecedented granular control over Linux workstations through centrally managed sudo policies while extending protection to their entire Linux estate.

Meanwhile, BeyondTrust has also extended support for Azure AD.

Many organisations have moved to Azure AD to accelerate the adoption of cloud resources and easily integrate SaaS applications into their security infrastructure. To support customers’ cloud migration journeys, BeyondTrust Active Directory Bridge now enables users to authenticate to an Azure AD tenant in addition to Active Directory in a hybrid mode. 

With this capability, organisations can leverage a seamless single sign-on (SSO) experience using their Active Directory infrastructure, reducing management complexity and improving their identity security posture.

BeyondTrust AD Bridge enables customers to leverage their existing investment in Active Directory to manage and secure on-premises and cloud-based Linux resources consistently. Extending familiar and effective Active Directory controls and policies to Linux enables organisations to unify their environments and drive consistency to support governance and compliance.

In addition, BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Unix and Linux also includes an Elasticsearch SIEM integration that brings a unified visual search experience.

Customers can index log data from Privilege Management for Unix and Linux and Active Directory Bridge into Elastic and other log sources to analyse and visualise data more efficiently through dashboards, charts or built-in apps. This enhanced visual experience helps teams be more precise, efficient, and quickly act on potential remediations. Kibana dashboards can also be leveraged to improve defence capabilities to detect suspicious and abnormal activities and automate analytics to address compliance requirements.

“By integrating BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Unix and Linux and BeyondTrust Active Directory Bridge with Elasticsearch, we provide a unified search experience for admins to quickly and easily find everything they need,” says Sam Elliot, Senior Vice President of Product Management at BeyondTrust.

“Together with the other expanded capabilities, BeyondTrust solutions further enable our customers to achieve their security goals with least privilege enforcement that doesn’t slow down end users.”

BeyondTrust Privilege Management for Unix and Linux 22.3 is now available.