The FDIC is reporting disappointing results after the Office of Inspector General performed an audit of its controls for securing and managing its Microsoft Windows Active Directory which it uses for central management of all IT system user credentials.
According to auditors, privileged system users didn’t practice simple password hygiene such as:
- Reusing their passwords
- Sharing passwords across multiple accounts
- Failing to change passwords for over a year
In addition, the probe found that, in over 900 cases, the accounts of users were not removed after prolonged inactivity. They also found three FDIC IT accounts with privileged access that remained privileged for almost a year after the access was no longer required for their positions.
Since the audit findings, the FDIC IG has made 15 recommendations to the agency for improving security controls such as providing password training and the removal of unnecessary privileges. This brings into question what training may have been up until now for password and credential controls, and other widely-used cybersecurity issues such as phishing, for example.
Details of the cybersecurity concerns come as the financial regulator headlines the SVB failure, and following another report published earlier this year also by the OIG, which found that the FDIC is not doing enough to monitor cyber risks within the institutions it regulates.
Oh boy.
I have there comments on this rather shambolic audit. The first is from
Naveen Sunkavalley, Chief Architect at Horizon3.ai had this comment:
“The issues highlighted in the audit – password re-use, excessive account privileges, and the failure to deactivate stale accounts – are very serious and commonly exploited by threat actors. These issues make it easier for an attacker to compromise an account and then use that single account to take over many other accounts and elevate privileges, ultimately leading to full compromise of AD and all AD-managed assets.
“The FDIC is not alone though. We see the same problems in many of the organizations we work with. And the problems can easily recur after being fixed once, as users join or leave an organization, or users change passwords. We recommend regular security assessments of Active Directory environments to identify issues and address them as soon as possible.
Baber Amin, COO at Veridium had this to say:
This report highlights two fundamental problems.
- Reliance on knowledge based credentials and trusting that humans will not follow the path of least resistance. Training is important, but we now have the means to eliminate passwords for the most part. The report continues to focus on password quality rather than asking for removal of passwords. Strong passwords that are not shared or reused actually do not need to rotate or update often. There is ample evidence on this.
- Multi factor authentication should also play a larger role than how it is treated in the report. This is the first line of defense.
Action: Don’t put a training band aid, eliminate the problem, eliminate passwords.
- Orphan accounts and access, and overarching entitlements
- I put these under the access umbrell Organizations need to embrace the concept of least privileged access and grant only the minimal amount of access necessary for the minimal amount of time. We have multiple entitlement management products and services that can root out orphan accounts, access sprawl, and even unused or orphan access grants. These tools need to be used on a regular basis.
Action: Limit access grants, use privileged access management tools to monitor privileged activity, use smart entitlements to limit overarching access, use smart monitoring to identify probes, and anomalies.
Morten Gammelgaard, EMEA, co-founder of BullWall had this to say:
“The fact that privileged users were found to be reusing passwords and sharing them across accounts, as well as failing to change passwords for extended periods, indicates a lack of awareness about the importance of good password hygiene practices.
“Moreover, the incorrect account configurations, and the discovery that user accounts were not removed after prolonged inactivity, reveals a lack of oversight in managing user accounts. These are common weaknesses that leave agencies vulnerable to cyber attacks, particularly ransomware attacks, which have only increased year over year.
“For all their potential resources, government agencies clearly need to prioritize cybersecurity best practices and implement robust security controls. This includes providing password training to users, regularly reviewing user accounts and privileges, and removing unnecessary elevated domain privileges.”
It’s bad enough that smaller businesses suffer from these sorts of issues. But for the FDIC to have these sorts of issues is insane. Hopefully this is the wake up call that they need to move them into a much better place. And everybody else should read this report and ensure that they don’t have any of these issues as well.





Today Is Digital Cleanup Day
Posted in Commentary on March 18, 2023 by itnerdDigital Cleanup Day, which is today, is dedicated to raising awareness of digital waste and its impact on the environment, and encouraging individuals, businesses, and even government agencies to do their part to declutter their digital footprint. It also reminds us that the ramifications of digital waste are significant.
The Digital Cleanup Day site states that internet use accounts for 3.7% of global carbon emissions, equivalent to all air traffic in the world (a stat also found here). This digital pollution contributes to global warming and climate change. Additionally, as the number of personal devices and data centers grows in order to store, manage, utilize, and protect the world’s exponential data growth, which unfortunately oftentimes includes digital waste, they require more energy to operate, which can put a strain on the power grid and increase energy costs.
All of this is in addition of course to the negative consequences digital clutter has on maintaining uptime and availability, ensuring the security of data and infrastructure, and optimizing resource utilization, which in turn has the potential to hurt an organization’s ability to meet business requirements and stay competitive in the industry.
Carl D’Halluin, CTO of Datadobi, and Amit Shaked, CEO and co-founder of Laminar, had this to say about why it’s important to be mindful of our digital habits and to take steps to reduce digital waste:
Carl D’Halluin, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Datadobi:
“Digital Cleanup Day is an initiative that encourages individuals and organizations to declutter and organize their digital lives. People are encouraged to clean up their digital devices, including their computers, data storage, smartphones, and tablets. This may involve deleting unnecessary files, organizing folders and emails, and/or uninstalling unused apps, unused cloud service subscriptions, and unused user accounts. The day’s goal is to promote better digital hygiene habits and help individuals and organizations become more efficient, productive, and secure in their digital lives. Of course, until recently, digital cleanup for enterprises was much easier said than done.
Organizations that wish to declutter on Digital Cleanup Day and maintain a clean and well-organized digital footprint moving forward should start with the biggest nut to crack. According to analyst estimates, 80%-90% of all data is unstructured. This includes but isn’t limited to unnecessary data copies, outdated data, data belonging to employees no longer with the organization, and expired data backups and archives. To tackle such a monumental task, users should seek a data management solution that is vendor-neutral and can handle all types of unstructured datasets, including file and object data, whether they are located on-premises or in the cloud. It must be able to assess, organize and act upon your data. That is, it must be able to assess and analyze metrics such as data size, date created, format, type, complexity, and frequency of access, as well as other unique factors that are important to your organization. Then, it must enable the user to organize the data into a schema that makes the most sense for that specific organization. And last critical piece of the puzzle… the solution must enable the user to act. That is, enable the user to migrate, move, replicate, sync, or delete data with a few clicks of the button.
Now that digital cleanup can be “easier done than said” with the right solution in hand, organizations can enjoy numerous benefits including optimized storage usage, streamlined data management, reduced risk of data breaches and non-compliance, and increased productivity due to better data accessibility. Moreover, digital cleanup can unlock the value of important data insights, leading to improved business decision-making and innovation opportunities.”
Amit Shaked, CEO and co-founder, Laminar:
“While Digital Cleanup Day’s main mission is to help organizations reduce carbon footprint, it also serves as an important reminder for IT, data governance and data security teams to start keeping tabs on all of their sensitive data in the cloud. Often data security teams are blind to the location, volume and types of sensitive data that lies in the cloud. Not only can unknown data lead to excess costs and digital waste, it can also introduce significant risk.
The rapid shift to the cloud and move toward data democratization has enabled organizations to quickly spin up data stores, especially in buckets or blob storage. Unfortunately, however, many companies don’t have full visibility into where their sensitive data resides. This unknown or “shadow” data is growing, and is a top concern for 82% of data security professionals. Examples of shadow data include database copies in test environments, analytics pipelines, orphaned backups, unlisted embedded databases and more.
To help reduce carbon footprint and the overall attack surface, organizations must start with complete observability of their data. With new agile and cloud-native tools, enterprises now have the solutions they need to clean up unnecessary data, and to keep up with today’s fast-paced, cloud environment.”
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