In October 2021, users of a major South Korean telecom operator, suddenly weren't able to use their payment, call, text, and internet services for a few hours. The company apologized the next day for the inconvenience it brought to its consumers due to service disruptions. It was such a sudden and a big problem that South Korea's ICT ministry issue a third-level warning out of a five-tier alert system during the disruption.

The company’s services, including the internet, payment, and phone call services, were disrupted beginning at around 11 a.m. the mentioned company appeared to have recovered most of its internet services by noon, though disruptions continued in some regions. At first, it was announced by the company that the problem was due to a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the network. A DDoS attack can be explained best as infected computers pushing to communicate with another single computer to overwhelm its connection bandwidth and crowd out legitimate users from access to the site.

However, as the investigation went on, it was announced that the reason behind the problem was a 'routing error’. Usually, the users are sorted into different routes to prevent overloading the system. When the error occurred, it forced all users to use a single route, then when that route overloaded, it moved users to another single route and caused a system outage in the end.

The importance of JIT (Just-in-Time) practice stands out than other functions of Access Management. A JIT function regulates which person can have access to which target at which period. Basically, it limits access, as well as the access time. Therefore it prevents system overloads while providing additional security. HIWARE provides Just-in-Time access management to any of our clients who wish to have that function.

 According to a Gartner research: 'The fundamental purpose of a JIT/ZSP approach is to reduce the attack surface for privileged access abuse. Basic PAM (vaulting and session management) will help mitigate the risk of the existence of privileged accounts. JIT reduces the risk of privileged access abuse, and ZSP reduces the attack surface of the privileged accounts themselves.'

Go to this link to read more about JIT in Access Management: https://www.gartner.com/document/3957029