Mitigate Risk and Improve M&A Agility

Challenge

Access reviews during the due diligence phase or post-integration are extremely critical for the eventual success of any M&A deal. Why? Any orphan or unused account presents a cyber risk vulnerability waiting to be exploited by hackers. Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood Group was marked with one such incident- hackers stole data of approximately 500million customers. The attackers remained in the system after Marriott acquired Starwood in 2016 and were not discovered until September 2018.

Our Approach

We recently put together a comprehensive access and entitlement review program for a financial services institution to help its M&A department stay on point. Using SecurEnds CEM and ILM, a multi-tenant, SaaS module, we created powerful governance and provisioning/ de-provisioning solution that will be used by the M&A team to evaluate and remediate potential attack vectors. The CEM module will allow recurring automated access review campaigns that validate users within systems and ensure their access rights are appropriate while the ILM module will drive the management of dormant and orphan accounts.