Teleport Adds Hosted Option to Managed Infrastructure Access – Source: securityboulevard.com

Teleport today updated its namesake open source infrastructure access management platform to include a teams option that the company hosts and manages.

In addition, Teleport 13 now provides a single access point that acts as a proxy for all the network protocols IT teams use to access network infrastructure.

Teleport CEO Ev Kontsevoy said the hosted Teleport Teams service provides an alternative to an existing, more expensive enterprise edition of Teleport.

The latest release of Teleport also includes automatic vulnerability testing as well as self-updating and patching across the entire infrastructure, eliminating the need for IT teams to track vulnerabilities and manually patch them.

Teleport 13 also enables routing of access requests across multiple infrastructure platforms via the encrypted TLS protocol.

Finally, Teleport is also adding an ability to import applications and groups from Okta to Application Access along with an integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) OpenSearch support for database access.

Legacy approaches to accessing IT resources generally rely on hard-coded shared credentials, such as passwords or keys, that provide access to application programming interfaces (APIs). The Teleport Access Plane makes it possible to programmatically issue certificates in a way that also provides a single source of truth for the management of credentials. If a credential is lost or stolen, the potential blast radius of that breach is limited to how long the certificate used to access a limited set of infrastructure resources remains valid. The identities of all users, infrastructure resources and custom applications are mapped to specific roles that both authorize access and create boundaries that fit each role. All events are also logged, tracked and monitored.

Teleport is mainly used by internal IT teams that are trying to securely access multiple types of infrastructure to provide application services.

The goal is to reduce friction while simultaneously improving security by eliminating dependencies on passwords and other credentials that are easily stolen. Cybercriminals have become especially adept at stealing credentials from IT professionals that they then use to distribute malware across an entire IT environment.

The more complex the IT environment the more likely it becomes IT administrators and DevOps teams will make a mistake that leads to an IT environment being compromised. Teleport reduces the cognitive load on IT teams in a way that also better secures the IT environment, said Kontsevoy.

There are, of course, a lot of issues for cybersecurity teams to focus on, so it’s easy to overlook the need to lock down access to IT infrastructure. However, in an era where developers routinely access IT infrastructure using a range of programmatic tools, the number of individuals within an IT team with access to infrastructure is today much greater than it was a few years ago. Cybercriminals view every individual with IT infrastructure access as a rich target and spend a significant amount of time and effort to gain illicit access to their credentials.

No one knows for sure how many internal IT teams’ credentials have been stolen, but given the number of passwords found on the dark web, most cybersecurity teams should assume they have already been compromised.