Why least privilege is the new antivirus. Most SMBs still don’t have it.

Endpoint privilege management for SMBs

Antivirus gets auto-renewed every year without a single meeting. Nobody debates it or asks for an ROI analysis. It just shows up on the invoice, gets paid and keeps running.

Now, ask this company to take away local admin rights from each endpoint. Suddenly, you have to present your business case, run a pilot program for at least three months and meet with stakeholders.

That disconnect in how companies spend money is much more costly to small and midsized businesses (SMBs) than they know. It is also the exact gap that ransomware attackers are using to their advantage.

The auto-renew vs. the ‘We’ll get to it’ problem

Antivirus earned its place in the budget decades ago because it was easy to understand. Virus bad. Software isolates viruses. Done. Every compliance checklist includes it and every cyber insurance questionnaire asks about it. The purchase is automatic.

Endpoint privilege management tells a different story in procurement meetings. It’s harder to explain. It touches how people do their work every day. Plus, it forces uncomfortable conversations about who actually needs admin access and why. So, it gets pushed to next quarter. Then the quarter after that.

The pattern is predictable. The tools that require behavior change get deprioritized behind the tools that run quietly in the background. However, running quietly in the background is exactly what uncontrolled admin rights do, too — until someone clicks the wrong link and ransomware moves laterally across your entire network in minutes.

What that gap actually costs

When ransomware hits a business, investigators first look at how the attacker moved from one machine to the rest. Almost every time, local admin rights gave them a highway.

If a user account with admin privileges is compromised, the attacker inherits everything that account can do. The threat actor can now:

• Install software
• Disable security tools
• Access network shares
• Escalate further

In an environment where most users are running as local admins, one compromised account can affect hundreds of systems before anyone notices.

Compare that to an environment where users only receive elevated but limited access when they need it for specific applications. The attacker lands on the same endpoint but hits a wall. They can’t install their payload, disable your defenses or spread.

Budget pressure is actually making the case

Forrester’s recent research on security budget pressures points to something CISOs already feel: there isn’t enough money to do everything. When budgets tighten, the right call is to focus on foundational controls that reduce the largest amount of risk for the lowest cost.

David Bellini

Removing local admin rights checks that box. It:

• Shrinks the attack surface across every endpoint in the organization
• Reduces the blast radius of any compromise that does happen
• Satisfies a growing list of compliance requirements and cyber insurance questionnaires
• Doesn’t require a dedicated team to maintain, unlike many security investments

Ironically, many SMBs are spending money on detection and response tools while leaving the front door unlocked. You can have the best alarm system in the world, but if every employee has a master key to the building, you haven’t solved your actual problem.

From nice to have to table stakes

Cyber insurance carriers are already treating endpoint privilege management as a baseline expectation. Some questionnaires went from one to 27 pages in a single renewal cycle, with privileged access front and center. Carriers know the data; they know that uncontrolled admin rights are a primary vector for the claims they’re paying out.

Compliance frameworks are getting more specific about it, too. It’s not enough to say, “We have a policy.” Auditors want proof that you’ve actually removed standing admin rights and that you can show who had access to what and when.

Five years from now, all organizations likely will treat managing endpoint privileges with the same diligence as they treat virus protection today. Privilege management will become a standard component of the stack, and will be automatically deployed and managed.

For SMBs, the question is do they want to get ahead of this curve by implementing privilege management proactively? Or will they wait until there is a breach, a denial of insurance claims or something else that forces them to implement privilege management?

There isn’t much operational overhead. The only thing standing in the way is treating it like an advanced security initiative when it’s really just basic hygiene that’s 20 years overdue.

David Bellini is CEO and a co-founder of CyberFOX. Along with his brother Arnie Bellini, he spun ConnectWise out of their Tampa-based IT service provider more than four decades ago. David was a major contributor in the private equity firm Thoma Bravo acquiring ConnectWise in 2019.

Featured image: AI generated by Copilot