<p>Financial institutions sit at the top end of the scale for security and reputational risk, with their databases of customer information making them especially vulnerable to criminal interception and subject to regulatory obligations. Taking this into consideration, it's crucial that banking and financial firms take a close look at how administrator rights are allocated on company-owned machines. This is problematic, given that unmanaged administrator rights can open the door to malware attacks that exploit elevated privileges, ultimately exposing sensitive financial data that can result in staggering, and frankly, unquantifiable damage.</p><p>But the reality is, managing these risks need not be a complex endeavor. To do so, companies should adopt an approach of least privilege, which takes into account security and productivity by granting users only the rights necessary to carry out their jobs. This can be accomplished with a five-step checklist and solve many of the problems created by a "loosely-managed" desktop environment.</p><p>Step 1 - Rationale</p><p>The first task is to clearly define the benefits of a privilege management project, which will vary even between organizations in the financial services sector, depending on their application infrastructure. A few themes, however, will be common to all:Security: The permissive elevation of admin privileges is an obvious security risk, because users can potentially run unauthorized software or even malware. Compliance: Policing admin rights has become a regulatory issue, not only to meet legal requirements imposed in some countries, but to satisfy independent audits. Efficiency and cost: There is potential to reduce helpdesk workload. Low-level functions, like power-management and connecting to printers, can be granted without administering full admin rights.</p><p><a href="http://www.scmagazine.com/the-five-step-privilege-management-checklist-for-financial-organizations/article/286060/">Keep reading...</a></p>