Contribute: Advice on automation security needed!

[Alizee]

Hello Community!

Today is Star Wars Day and because Star Wars day is on the first Thursday of May this year, today's also World Password Day.

World Password Day promotes better password habits since we all know passwords are essential to digital security. But as Blue Prism experts, we also know that the security of an automation initiative goes way beyond passwords and that security and productivity can sometimes be… frenemies. 

So to celebrate World Password Day, I'm writing an awareness blog on automation and Blue Prism product security, and would love for your inner security jedis to share the advice you would give to anyone looking to ensure their automations are kept safe?

Here are some prompts to get you started:

• How frequently do you perform security audits?

• How do your treat user accounts vs. system accounts for password management?

• How frequently do you review your LAM, and what triggers a review?

I'll feature your best real-life, practical guidance in the blog (with all due credit) 🙂

PS: My password is "JarJarBinks" because no one would ever guess that someone would be stupid enough to use that as their password. JK.

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Alizée L.
Senior Customer Success Manager
SS&C Blue Prism
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[Michael_S]

@Alizee I am not qualified to answer but I wanted to let you know that I LOVE this and I encourage everyone to jump in here and share your past experiences, advice and gathered best practices 💙

Also,

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU!

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💙 Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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[Babjee24]

Hi @Alizee 

With my experience answer for one of your 3 questions is as follows:

How do your treat user accounts vs. system accounts for password management?---> There's a practice that we used to follow for resetting a credential before it's expiry, an automated Blueprism process that sets up the password for the machine account (if the process of resetting doesn't have cognitive decisions to be made for instance without captcha) will reset the password both in credential manager and in the application. As we have the flexibility given by Blueprism to customize the number of characters, casing, special characters to be present in the password while generating the password can make the password to one of the best complex levels.
Also, we can set expiry in credential manager to the freshly created ones, this will make sure that the password is expired or invalid in future there by calling the auto generate process when this condition is met or when we encounter the change password window.

Another way of managing credentials by one of the clients that I worked with is, client used to have a third party application where in they maintain a repository of the credentials and then API access to specific credential in the repository is provided to the machine user. Whenever there is a password expiry window popping up a notification is sent to reset the credentials. Having this separate layer by the client will make sure that there's no breach from RPA end.

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Babjee Vangipurapu
Senior RPA Developer
Wonderbotz
India
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[jessetutt]

This is a complicated topic - might be worth scheduling a meetup, google meet, zoom, teams call.

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Jesse Tutt
Program Director, IT AAA COE
Alberta Health Services
Red Deer, Alberta, Canada
https://albertahealthservices.ca
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