Why Unmanaged “Digital Cruft” Is a Hacker's Goldmine

Clutter accumulates everywhere—the household junk drawer, an employee’s car, and yes, even your business’ network. In your business network, this clutter is called “digital cruft” and can lead to some pretty serious problems if you aren’t careful.

In fact, your digital cruft may be your organization’s most significant vulnerability.

What is Digital Cruft, Exactly?

Digital cruft is—in a manner of speaking—all the debris that tends to build up as a side effect of doing business. This covers quite a range of things, such as:

• Active user accounts - Let’s face it: the chances that Amilie, the young girl who interned at your company four years ago, still needs access to the accounts you gave her for her job are realistically zero. The same goes for anyone you’ve had to let go, or who moved on to another company. Their (hopefully) unused access credentials officially count as cruft, sitting abandoned on your network.
  
  
• Old, outdated, and unpatched software - Similarly, old software—products and services you simply no longer use—that remains on your infrastructure, gathering digital dust, also counts as cruft. As such, it gradually ages without receiving maintenance or updates.
  
  
• Unneeded permissions - Many businesses deal with the kind of issue where someone—let’s say Jim from your accounting department—was granted access to some of HR’s materials for one of his projects. If he still has access a year after that project ended, his excessive permissions are another key to sensitive materials that don’t need to (and shouldn’t) exist… cruft.

Hopefully, you’ve noticed a pattern developing.

Where We See Cruft, Attackers See Opportunity

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a cybercriminal for a moment. If you had the choice between:

• A. Developing the intricate code required to bamboozle and bypass layers of security protections

…or…

• B. Using a known vulnerability to access a targeted network and efficiently accomplish your goals at your leisure

…which would you choose?

Most of us would opt for B. If your network is filled with digital cruft, there’s more opportunity for vulnerabilities to be present… another place to try breached passwords, more software with bugs in its code, additional tech that might need updates or patches that could be missed.

For instance:

• Bill from sales might have reused his work password on the kitchen management application KitchenPal, and hasn’t changed it since he initially downloaded it in March of 2023. Trouble is, KitchenPal was breached in November of 2023, and Bill was one of the 100,000 or so users impacted. The data—which included names, email addresses, passwords, and social media profiles—could have allowed an attacker to identify where Bill works. This could be all they need to access your network.
  
  
• An attacker might scan the Internet for an abandoned-but-once-popular tool, and come across your business’ server, where that tool has sat—unused—for a year and a half. Thanks to an unpatched vulnerability, they have no problem getting in.
  
  
• Bill’s back, this time falling for a phishing email. Once the attacker has access to his business account, they discover that Bill (despite working in sales) has access to the accounting department and its data. This gives the hacker the ability to steal this data, edit what is left behind, and otherwise cause trouble for the business.

We Can Help Get Rid of Your Cruft… and Keep It Out

Much like the dust that immediately starts to gather after the dust cloth is put away, cruft always reaccumulates. However, you can prevent a lot of it by minimizing it… or by letting a proactive IT consultant and specialist take care of it on your behalf.

Network Solutions Unlimited can come in and go over every nook and cranny of your business’ information technology network, taking a comprehensive inventory of what we find and noting every user, their permissions, and the software their role will require. That’s how we begin helping you.

We then continue by running interference on your behalf. We’ll review user permissions and rescind any that are no longer necessary. Any software will be maintained and, when that is no longer an option or a better option is adopted, removed. When someone leaves the company, their accounts will be disabled.

We’d Be Happy to Get Started, So Please Reach Out!

Give us a call at (217) 428-6449 to learn more about what you need and what you don’t, and how we can help you manage it.