Bank of Cyprus reduces security risks from internal users with UserLock
- Bank of Cyprus
- Financial Services
- Europe
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The Bank of Cyprus is a Cypriot financial services company established in 1899 with its headquarters in Strovolos. As a fast growing organization with over 4500 employees spread across Cyprus, United Kingdom, Russia, Ukraine & Romania, the need to enforce and enhance internal users’ security policy to all its locations became a primary objective for the group.
"One of UserLock's most important capabilities is the ability to prevent concurrent logins and credential sharing between users. This is especially important at the Bank's branches where users are responsible for financial transactions."
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team
Having recognized that security risks from inside the organization were as important as those from the external security perimeter, the Bank of Cyprus set out to improve access security for authorized users and close existing network security gaps.
To protect user accounts from compromise and to prevent insider threats, the IT team identified the need to disable concurrent logins, to prevent credential sharing, and to enable security incidents response to be both timely and effective.
"Due to the nature of our organization as a bank it was a real headache to prevent users from sharing credentials or logging in to more than one workstation at a time."
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team
Before implementing UserLock, the IT team didn't have a way to help enforce their user security policy or to empower IT to track, record, or automatically block any suspicious sessions.
"We used to manually check and monitor whether the login user was already logged in to another machine. With no GUI available all user access needed to be reviewed and monitored manually, making it incredibly time consuming to respond to any security incidents."
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team
To help protect the organization’s critical assets, Bank of Cyprus implemented UserLock across the whole Group, currently managing 3500 user accounts.
"The most important capability is the ability to prevent concurrent logins and credential sharing between the users, especially at the Bank’s branches where users are responsible for financial transactions."
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team
With UserLock’s intuitive and easy to use GUI interface, Bank of Cyprus has the capability to control user access and enforce its customized user security policy.
The IT team can now effectively limit or stop simultaneous sessions and monitor/audit all user’s activity in real-time. Preventing concurrent logins alleviates the threat of shared passwords as it impacts users own ability to access the network.
UserLock also makes it impossible for any rogue users to use valid credentials at the same time as their legitimate users and prevents serious accountability and non-repudiation issues.
"The deployment process was surprisingly fast and easy with no errors. The intuitive and easy to use GUI interface lets you get right to the business of hardening network security. Any time since that we have needed to contact the support team I would say the level of service provided was beyond our expectation – they reacted almost instantly. Taking into consideration the overall features and excellent support of the product I would characterize the whole engagement with IS Decisions as outstanding."
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team
By empowering the team to track, record and automatically block all suspicious session, UserLock has also dramatically reduced the time needed by the administrators to respond to related security incidents and day-to-day operational tasks.
“Easy to use, easy to deploy and great support.”
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team
Since 2010 when it was first deployed at the Bank of Cyprus, UserLock has been expected to and has effectively achieved to help protect the Bank’s critical assets.
"With UserLock’s real-time access monitoring and alerts, the administrator can instantly react and perform corrective actions either by remotely locking, logging off or resetting the appropriate session. This has added a huge value to the organizations’ day-to-day operations."
Andreas N. Matheou - Head, Infrastructure Team