Description of assignment
With the rise of remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack has significantly increased. This change in the work environment has led to improved communication between team members. At the same time, this shift has also led to a greater awareness of the need for cybersecurity, as remote work brings new risks.
In this internship assignment, we want to combine these two trends. Our goal is to investigate how a security solution can work more effectively through integration with a collaboration tool.
A key player in the world of cybersecurity is CyberArk. This company is known as a market leader in PAM Security. PAM, or Privileged Account Management, is an essential part of security for any company. It involves managing and securing access to critical systems and data.
Our assignment focuses on combining this PAM security with the capabilities of modern collaboration tools. We want to investigate how security tasks can be performed more efficiently via a chat interface.
Our intended results include the development of specific scenarios, both predefined and identified by you. The predefined scenarios are as follows:
- Emergency Button for Cyber Attacks:
- In the event of a cyber attack, you may want to secure specific parts of the system, such as blocking access for a particular user and changing the passwords of the affected accounts.
- Approval Process for High-Privilege Accounts:
- High-privilege accounts often need to go through an approval process before they can be used. However, this can be cumbersome. By using a chat interface, approval processes can be expedited.
- Password Recovery:
- Password recovery is a common task. If this task can be automated via a chat interface, it can save a significant amount of time.
- Temporary Access:
- Sometimes temporary access to a privileged account is required. This process can often be complex. Through a chat interface, this can be significantly accelerated.
- Suspicious Activity Detection:
- An automated chat interface can be used to detect suspicious activities. For example, if an account attempts to log in multiple times from different locations within a short period, this can trigger an automatic alert and further security measures.
To develop these use cases, we use a tool offered by CyberArk: Identity Flows. This tool integrates with modern collaboration tools and provides the ability to implement the mentioned scenarios.
Objectives
The following deliverables will be requested:
- Setting up the PAM environment.
- Choosing which collaboration tool you want to use.
- Executing the different scenarios:
-
- Emergency Button for Cyber Attacks
- Approval Process for High-Privilege Accounts
- Password Recovery
- Temporary Access
- Suspicious Activity Detection
- A scenario of your choice
Optional extensions
- Study how much work it takes to transfer the scenarios to another collaboration tool.
Project methodology
ActWise uses agile project methodologies for its projects, such as XP and SCRUM. The project described above follows the same approach. These methodologies focus on ensuring the quality of software solutions. This is achieved by breaking the project into shorter iterations and through intensive communication within and outside the project team. The emphasis on intensive communication is an intrinsic feature of agile, resulting in thorough guidance during the internship period.
