DGSI is responsible, in collaboration with other departments of the state, for developing and setting strategy for information systems and communication of administration and security policy. Recognizing the importance of securing their critical assets and protecting its employees against the growing volume of cyber attacks, DGSI senior management decided to strengthen its information security by setting up a solution for user access management. During the vendor selection process, CyberArk, Wallix, Lieberman Software and Balabit products were all evaluated. The DGSI chose Lieberman Software’s Enterprise Random Password Manager™ (ERPM) together with Balabit’s Shell Control Box (SCB).
The Lieberman Software – Balabit Solution
The combined solution, recommended and implemented by integration partner I-Tracing, provides:
- Monitoring of all privileged user access (systems administrators, etc.) to servers and other systems,
- Supervision of the entire IT environment,
- Recording of administrators’ commands and application launches, and
- A tamper-proof, easily interpreted evidence for forensics investigations.
"The secure storage of video records, the transparent operation and the smooth network integration were all important for us,” said the Project Manager at Direction G?n?rale des Syst?mes d’Information, State of Geneva. “But the decisive point was the fact that SCB was able to do Optical Character Recognition, not only on the titles of the windows, but on all content appearing on the screen of the users.”
“We are delighted to be selected by DGSI to secure data for this important government institution,” said Zolt?n Gy?rk?, CEO, Balabit. “We have been working very closely with our colleagues at Lieberman Software and we entered the bidding process confident that not only did our integrated solution perform seamlessly, but offered our customers the most secure technology solution being evaluated. We look forward to fully implementing our joint solution for DGSI and to working closely with Lieberman Software on new opportunities.”
Deployed in a high availability configuration, Balabit’s SCB is integrated with Lieberman Software’s ERPM to control and record the access of 200 system administrators at almost 3000 hosts (including Linux, Windows, VMware virtual machines, KVM SUN Solaris and IBM AIX systems). The solution was integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, which makes authentication of Windows users easy, while ERPM’s privileged credential management capabilities manage access to the shared UNIX accounts.
“The DGSI implementation is interesting on a number of fronts. It marks the first time a government department has combined real-time monitoring and recording of privileged user activities inside the network in a manner that makes an insider attack or breach almost impossible to pull off,” said Philip Lieberman, President and CEO, Lieberman Software. “I’m quite pleased that the integration of our Privileged Identity Management technology and Balabit’s SCB went so smoothly and that it provided the security and compliance benefits that DGSI needed.”
Centralized Access Policy, Reliable Two Factor Authentication and Evidence
The implementation of Lieberman Software’s ERPM with Balabit’s SCB offers many benefits to the State of Geneva:
- Two-factor authentication makes it possible to reliably identify the real user behind a shared account.
- SCB monitors and records privileged activities on systems, enabling the organization to investigate IT activities.
- DGSI now has the ability to provide strong evidence of the absence of malicious intent in the case of post-incident investigations. For this, the video recordings can be replayed at any time.
- The architecture based on the Balabit SCB solution applies a centralized network access policy for the State of Geneva.
"We’ve pioneered a new working philosophy at the local government by introducing a centralized, controlled, and monitored access to our critical systems, which replaces an unsupervised, direct access process,” according to the Project Manager, DGSI, State of Geneva.
