"We had an issue where people’s accounts were being locked randomly. Due to the inability to pinpoint the problem, troubleshooting was very difficult. After becoming a Silverfort customer, they helped us realize it was our RADIUS server. This helped us determine/troubleshoot the issue of these random locked-out accounts. The limited visibility into these user and service accounts made it extremely difficult to identify and troubleshoot irregular activity,” said Nesbitt.

Due to the variety of security challenges and their increased awareness of identity threats, Shannon Medical Center began searching for an identity security solution that would meet all their security needs as well as the needs of their healthcare environment.

“We were looking to proactively – rather than reactively – secure our admin credentials and this led us to Silverfort. We ran a demo and a technical POC with Silverfort and they clearly displayed that what they were offering actually works. This helped us make the decision to go with Silverfort. Unlike other security solutions, Silverfort does exactly what it says it does, which is the most important factor for us when deciding to partner with a security solution,” says Nesbitt.

Since implementing Silverfort’s service account capabilities, Shannon Medical Center has full confidence in knowing that its service accounts are being continuously monitored and protected.

“We are protecting approximately 1000 service accounts using Silverfort, enabling us to determine the source, destination, and last time a service account was used for each account. If, for instance, we notice in our Silverfort console that there is a service account that has not been used for more than three months, we know it is time to remove the account from our environment. We have found Silverfort’s service account capability to be extremely valuable for our overall security posture strategy,” said Nesbitt.

In their initial review of the product, Shannon Medical Center was shown how Silverfort could help with service account security. They soon realized that Silverfort’s service account capabilities were extremely useful for their security needs.

• Implemented MFA protection for all users and resources

• Strengthened AD hygiene by having complete visibility into user types and their activity

• Gained full visibility and protection of all service accounts

• Minimal security controls to protect user access requests, especially for admins

• Limited visibility and insights into their Active Directory environment

• No visibility into service accounts

For more than 75 years, Shannon Medical Center has served the healthcare needs of the community in the San Angelo area. Their facility is licensed for 400 beds and provides a variety of clinical services to meet each patient’s needs. They are the designated Lead Level 3 Trauma Center for the region, have a nationally recognized Intensive Care Unit, provide critical care to newborns as young as 28 weeks, perform state-of-the-art diagnostics in their radiology department, and provide complete testing and surgical capabilities for cardiology patients among many more services.

Additionally, Shannon Medical Center quickly realized they needed visibility into the activity of user and service accounts in their environments.

"Our efforts to secure our environment were further complicated by this blind spot, which made it difficult for us to understand how we could improve our overall security posture. Conducting AD audits was an extremely challenging task, further complicating our efforts,” Nesbitt added.

"This helped us manage our AD environment more efficiently while improving our company security posture,” Nesbitt added.

They also improved their AD hygiene by decreasing the number of unwanted authentications in their environment. “As a result of Print Nightmare, our environment was experiencing over 24,000,000 daily authentications, which was extremely unusual."

After signing on with Silverfort, Shannon Medical Center quickly deployed the solution and immediately saw an increase in its security posture.

“We implemented ten access policies that quickly extended MFA protection across our environments. Our Silverfort policies helped us secure our admin credentials while adding MFA protection to access requests to our domain controllers. As an additional security measure, we implemented Silverfort’s MFA protection for all access requests to VMware vCenter Server. Thanks to Silverfort, we now have complete visibility into all our accounts’ behavior and all access requests to our core business applications,” Nesbitt said.

Shortly afterward, Shannon Medical Center gained additional value from Silverfort around AD hygiene.

As a prominent healthcare provider, Shannon Medical Center needed to increase its overall security posture. This meant applying MFA protection to its entire user base and gaining better visibility into its admin users’ activity as well as its overall IT infrastructure.

“We wanted to be more secure because we run a hospital and protecting our patients’ sensitive data is a top priority. We initially didn’t have MFA protection applied to any of our users or resources across our environments, and we specifically needed it on all access requests to our electronic medical records (EMR) application. We also needed external MFA for remote users and for our admin credentials to prevent malicious actors from making powerful lateral movements via PowerShell if they were compromised. This led us to think about how we could add MFA protection to our admin credentials and domain admins,” says Ashley Nesbitt, System Security Administrator at Shannon Medical Center.

To strengthen their overall identity security posture management, Shannon Medical Center first needed to gain better visibility and management of their Active Directory.