Robotic process automation has taken the world by storm. The concept of automating routine and mundane activities to save time, and free up the workforce is nothing short of a revolution that has now become an indispensable part of corporations worldwide. A study conducted by Gartner revealed that nearly 80% of leaders in the finance industry have implemented or are planning to implement RPA in the near future.
RPA, albeit helping drive productivity and profits, faces certain threats that can potentially cost businesses millions of dollars. Data leakage and theft are two major robotic process automation security risks. Critical data, such as RPA bot passwords or consumer data handled by RPA, may be exposed to attackers if appropriate security procedures are not in place.
RPA passwords are often exchanged so that they can be reused. A potential attacker may intercept the password and use them to elevate privileges and obtain access to sensitive networks, software, and data. Cybersecurity Intelligence reported that 2021 saw 50% more cyber attacks per week on corporate networks compared to 2020, which further highlights the need for risk mitigation tactics that can keep your RPA systems fully protected.
Let’s take a look at the steps you can take to properly address your robotic process automation security risks and how you can keep your system safe.
How to Mitigate RPA Security Risks
The following are the steps you can take to mitigate and tackle your robotic process automation security risks.
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Provide Accountability for Bot Actions
As companies ride the RPA wave, a major aspect that has gone under the radar is the differentiation between bot operators and bot identifiers. Assigning a specific identity to each RPA robot and method ensures devoted authentication credentials and identity naming requirements.
Moreover, privileged credentials should be removed from vulnerable locations, such as scripts, and stored in a secure place. Two-factor human-to-system authentication can be used to add an extra layer of security to the existing protocol of username and password authentication.
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Reduce and Restrict Account Privileges
The implementation and deployment of RPA can lead to an increase in account privileges. Security supervisors need to restrict RPA access to what each bot strictly needs to conduct their respective tasks. For example, an RPA script with a bot that copies certain values from a database and pastes them into an email should only have read access to the database, rather than write access.
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Safeguard Log Integrity
In the situation of RPA security failure, the management and security team will need to review the logs. RPA logging is usually fed to a separate system where the logs are secure and safely processed.
Enterprises must ensure that the RPA tool creates an accurate, system-generated log that is devoid of loopholes that might obstruct any investigation.
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Regular Reviewing and Updation of RPA Scripts
The development of an RPA solution is a continuous process. It is not a one-time procedure and rather needs constant evolution to tackle novel vulnerabilities and threats. To speed up deployment, organizations tend to postpone security considerations until RPA scripts are ready to run, which can be a grave mistake.
To reduce robotic process automation security risks, you need to make sure that the RPA console access is secured by protecting the RPA administrators’ passwords. You’ll also need to create a risk system that assesses RPA implementation and individual scripts. Remember to periodically review and test RPA scripts.
RPA is the future, which is more the reason why organizations should carefully prepare their RPA deployments to avoid security breaches. The above-mentioned are just a few of the steps that you can take to address your robotic process automation security risks. These procedures enable RPA to manage security risks on its own, resulting in improved robot efficiency and lower risks for the business.
Why Choose Intone?
Intone is a market leader when it comes to providing RPA solutions. Partnering with Enterprise Bot, our solutions have proven to have 2x times more features in respect to use-case and mapping and 3x times more features with respect to intelligent routing than that is provided by Google Dialogflow. We are proud of our capabilities to provide innovative solutions and expertise that are needed for you to embrace the future today. We offer,
- Intone offers top-of-the-line enterprise-grade security with a minimum of 256-bit encryption at both transmission and rest.
- State-of-the-art front-end RPA, where we ensure that your customers have a superior experience and that they start to see your brand in a whole new light.
- Our back-end RPA can easily automate the most mundane, repetitive, and labor-intensive tasks to free up your employees to help them focus on higher-order tasks.
- We have higher accuracy than our competitors and we also offer multilingual solutions as compared to the market standard of English only.
- Our advanced NLP understands customer requests and responds in a conversational manner with a minimum accuracy of 85%.
- Intone offers efficient omnichannel support through easy integration with commonly used customer support channels like Gmail, Outlook 365, etc.
Added Benefits of Implementing Intone’s RPA:
- Intone’s RPA will anonymize your data to ensure greater protection of sensitive data and information.
- Intone offers end-to-end hyper-automation with our low-code engine.
Check out how Intone can help you streamline your manual business process with Robotic Process Automation solutions.
Sources:
- https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/4-steps-to-ensure-robotic-process-automation-security
- https://www.gartner.com/en/finance/insights/robotics-in-finance
- https://www.automationanywhere.com/company/blog/learn-rpa/an-rpa-primer-three-simple-steps-to-automate-your-organization
- https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/corporate-cyber-attacks-up-50-last-year-6069.html
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay