2016_HSA_Yrbk_YUMPU_r2___

GSN 2016 DIGITAL YEARBOOK OF HOMELAND SECURITY AWARDS RECIPIENTS
2016
GSN 2016 Government Excellence Award
USDA Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS)
2016 Winner
Awards Category:
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Most Notable Federal Government Security Program,
Project or Initiative
Name of Nominated Product, Service,
or Program:
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BeyondTrust Powerbroker
Reason this entry deserves to win:
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In June of 2015, the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) launched a 30-day Cybersecurity Sprint to assess
and improve the health of all Federal assets and networks.
Agencies were directed to protect Federal information
systems, and improve the resilience of networks
in both civilian and military organizations, then report
on their successes and challenges. Organizations were
instructed to immediately patch critical vulnerabilities
and strictly limit the number of privileged users with access
to authorized systems, while significantly accelerating
the use of strong authentication for privileged users.
The US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research
Service (USDA-ARS), took the call to action seriously
and set out to rapidly secure 11,000 privileged users in
their windows environment. Deploying BeyondTrust
Powerbroker for Windows in half the time expected
for a deployment of this size, the USDA-ARS was able
to secure and manage their privileged accounts quickly
and efficiently. In many cases, achieving this well ahead
of peer agencies.
Legacy Software: Upgrades and Vulnerabilities
The USDA-ARS began to see immediate benefits. “As
we brought ARS sites from around the country into
Enterprise Active Directory, under the agency domain,
we found thousands of machines had older versions of
software, such as Internet Explorer, Adobe, Java, etc.
Many of these older versions of software were found to
contain vulnerabilities and a mandate was generated to
upgrade to the latest versions. With PBW, I was able to
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