Administration accounts are necessary to make changes to computer systems, whether this is on a standard machine or a server. But this is also a huge weakness to an organisation, even when we implement 2FA (also known as MFA).

Good question, when you consider admin accounts they have to be accessible to your staff to make changes and sometimes your customers may demand that their account is set as a local admin account or that they are given admin rights.

Unfortunately, this is a big security risk, if you are using a server and a user has admin rights then you are opening up yourself to a huge security risk and possible future cyber attack.

With an admin account you are able to do just some of the following:

• Change Core System Settings
• Install programs
• Over-ride UAC
• Uninstall Programs
• Alter Policies
• Remove Accounts
• Break Domain Connections

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what damage could be achieved, Cyber Essentials certification recommends all users be set up as standard users and if there are any admin accounts they should be locked off.

Protecting both our clients and our own business is incredibly important and do this first by removing any entry points that could cause issues.

Ah but we can, Hamilton Group uses special software to enable us to assist our users no matter where we are in the world. Cyber Security is growing in importance constantly, we even employ the same system internally.

When you try and access a new program that triggers either UAC or an admin command, you will send a request automatically to our system and one of our engineers will approve your request or deny depending on the situation.

If that thought crossed your mind please understand that we aren’t implementing this as a way of controlling our clients or restricting access to their data. Not only that but if our clients did refuse this process then we are able to exempt a user account.

However, properly implementing security does mean we have to sometimes go against what a client may want to ensure that their cyber security isn’t compromised.

We’ve worked for and come across many IT companies that use the same password for every admin account, and sometimes that same password is used on the internet for other applications.

This is a huge security risk to your company or others, I would 100% recommend adopting the same policies in your company. However, if your current IT provider is not adopting a similar policy we would love to hear from you.

At the time of writing, we are only able to offer this for Windows computers. We do however recommend that if you use a Mac or Linux machine you set any user accounts as a standard user and have an admin account set up with the credentials stored in a Password Manager.

If you set up a Password Manager right, it is possible to share the password with employees but never actually enable them to export the password, although that does depend on what system you are accessing or what web application.

If any of this has piqued your interest and would like to have a chat, book an appointment below or email us at hello@hgmssp.com.

When joining Hamilton Group Managed IT, there is an application you install that gets us going quickly, just download the tool here.