February 2023 Summaries

Entitlement creep is a significant issue faced by enterprises using Snowflake, where users gradually accumulate unnecessary permissions as their roles within the company evolve. This can lead to serious data breaches and compliance issues. Veza is an authorization platform that integrates with major cloud providers, identity providers, databases, and SaaS apps to provide a singular and central place for understanding, managing, and controlling access across organizations. It enables businesses to implement effective data governance through privilege automation, including preventing entitlement creep by visualizing and managing it, setting up privilege automation, and conducting intelligent access reviews.

Whale phishing, also known as spear phishing, is a form of social engineering that targets high-level executives with the aim of exploiting their privileged identities to compromise sensitive data, plant ransomware or steal money. These attacks are highly personalized and require significant investment from cybercriminals due to the research, time and capital needed to create believable phishing outreach. Whale phishing is on the rise, with a 131% increase in Q4 of 2020 to Q1 of 2021, and total phishing attempts up by 350% since 2020. The impact can be significant, with companies incurring costs of $120,000 per phishing attack on average. To protect against these attacks, organizations should evolve their security procedures, instill a communicative culture, plan to fail and double down on the principle of least privilege.

Critical business discussions are increasingly taking place in online spaces like Slack, even if employees mostly work in the office. While Slack can boost productivity by removing friction from collaboration and decision-making, it also introduces new vulnerabilities and challenges for security and governance teams. Companies should treat Slack as they would any other sensitive asset and establish best practices for access, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users. Three tips for securely collaborating in Slack include knowing who your admins are, understanding the external user permissions, and ensuring visibility and control of all accounts provisioned to Slack. Integrating Slack with a platform like Veza can help manage these aspects effectively.

The text discusses the challenges of managing and securing access to data in a data warehouse or lake tool like Snowflake, as applications, users, and data multiply. It introduces Veza, an authorization platform for data security that solves this problem by mapping identities through access control structures to data, making it easy to understand, manage, and control data access. The text then delves into the details of how Snowflake manages data access, highlighting its complex and fine-grained access controls around roles, users, and privileges. It explains that Veza addresses these concerns by mapping identities to data, allowing organizations to visualize identity-to-data relationships, understand effective permissions, track the history of permissions for threat response, constantly monitor for least privilege violations, and conduct intelligent access reviews. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of restoring the relationship between identities and data in managing complex data access landscapes effectively.