FFIEC News

Lieberman Software Offers Secure Enterprise Password Vault for User and Administrator Passwords

(Aug 13, 2007)-- As the amount of applications and systems that users require access to escalates, so does the number of unique passwords that users must manage. This proliferation increases the likelihood of users forgetting their passwords and being locked out of systems, or mismanaging them and jeopardizing security. To alleviate this situation, Lieberman Software's Random Password Manager now allows users to store all of their passwords in an AES encrypted database and recover them when necessary.

Shared accounts with superuser privileges, or other high-level access rights and service accounts for application-to-application or application-to-database communication, can pose significant risks to all organizations. Using specialized password management tools can minimize these risks.
In addition to securely storing user password information, the Password Vault can also archive passwords for IT components that administrators need to manage, such as hardware firewalls or network devices. Account information is entered into Random Password Manager's encrypted database through a secure, audited web interface. Delegated users who forget their credentials, and cannot access a system or application, can quickly retrieve their own passwords through the web interface, without interacting with the Help Desk or IT staff.

"To deal with the volume of passwords that must be managed, many organizations resort to such tactics as writing passwords on sticky notes or automatically logging users in to systems, which are both flawed security practices," said Chris Stoneff, Product Manager at Lieberman Software. "Other times administrators attempt to implement Single Sign-On solutions, but discover that these methods consume system resources and slow down network performance. Random Password Manager's new ability to centrally store all user passwords in an encrypted vault, and allow them to be retrieved on demand, is a significant security enhancement for organizations managing large, cross-platform environments."

Enterprise Security Management
The new Password Vault feature in Random Password Manager supplements the product's existing enterprise security management capabilities. Random Password Manager regularly randomizes the common account credentials that most organizations deploy on every system in the network. The danger of using common credentials is that if the local administrator password can be deciphered on just one system, an unauthorized user can gain peer-level access throughout the enterprise.

According to Gartner, "Shared accounts with superuser privileges, or other high-level access rights and service accounts for application-to-application or application-to-database communication, can pose significant risks to all organizations. Using specialized password management tools can minimize these risks." *

By automatically generating unique, complex administrator passwords for each system in the enterprise, Random Password Manager eliminates the threat of one compromised password providing unrestricted access throughout the network. Randomization is automatically conducted from a single console for all managed systems according to schedules established by the administrator. All actions performed by the product are logged and audited - providing a record of systems managed and passwords changed - helping organizations demonstrate compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, and other government security mandates.

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