NSA and CISA publish identity and access management best practices for US

Two powerful security agencies of the U.S. government have published best ID and access management practices recommended for system administrators.

The list of actionable pieces of advice were created by the National Security Agency and CISA, the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It is difficult to know how applicable the practices can be to sysadmins elsewhere in the world.

Executives who feel they have a handle on the situation could still benefit from a discussion about IAM monitoring and auditing.

The guideline announcement dives directly into a summary of the Colonial Pipeline attack in 2021, which proved that vigilance and defensive strategies are required now to avoid catastrophic economic and physical damage due to cyberattacks.

Boilerplate IAM could have prevented the Colonial attack, according to the federal government.

“IAM is a critical part of every organization’s security posture,” Grant Dasher, an ID engineer with CISA, says in a statement.

“We must work collectively with the public and private sector to advance more secure by default and secure by design IAM solutions,” says Dasher.

The best-practices reference itself was created by the NSA and CISA along with input from a public-private security group known as the Enduring Security Framework.

The guide is broken into discussions about ways to mitigate IAM threats – describing each one and emphasizing its importance.

The topics are ID governance, environmental hardening, ID federation and single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and IAM monitoring and auditing.

Article Topics

best practices  |  CISA  |  cybersecurity  |  digital identity  |  identity access management (IAM)  |  multi-factor authentication  |  NSA  |  U.S. Government