Businesses of all sizes leverage Adobe Creative Cloud to achieve various outcomes, whether document sharing through Adobe Sign or leveraging their creative suite of tools (e.g. Adobe Photoshop or Adobe After Effects). As a result, a lot of Intellectual Property (IP) and company information can be contained within Creative Assets, and this blog is intended to address Adobe Creative Cloud Security to protect your assets.
1. Configure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is often overlooked but is critical to protecting your organization’s accounts. Given that most employees and contractors typically have insecure password practices, the attacker will need access to the MFA code to access their Creative Cloud account if their account is compromised. Using app-based MFA instead of SMS is best to prevent attacks such as SIM Swapping. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Cloud only supports enforced MFA on their Enterprise plan, making this a manual task. Skip to the end of the blog to learn how WatchDog Security built a free solution to address this and track your user’s MFA adoption across sites like Adobe that limit you to an enterprise plan to gain access to MFA or other security features.
Authentication settings (Adobe Enterprise docs) Secure your Adobe account with two-step verification
2. Control Your Sharing and Collaboration Options
Adobe Creative Cloud simplifies collaboration by enabling you to share files and projects with others. However, it’s crucial to maintain the security of your work. When sharing files, it’s essential to set specific permissions for each collaborator and decide whether they can view, comment on, or edit the shared content. For an added layer of security, use password protection for sensitive files to restrict access and share the password through a secure medium, such as not in the same email with the link to the password-protected file.
- Securing PDFs with passwords (Adobe Acrobat Documentation)
- Collaborate on Creative Cloud Libraries and folders (Adobe CC Documentation)
Securing PDFs with passwords (Adobe Acrobat Documentation) Collaborate on Creative Cloud Libraries and folders (Adobe CC Documentation)
3. Setup a Security Contact
A designated security contact is crucial in case of account issues or suspicious activity. This contact will receive essential security alerts and notifications, ensuring you can respond quickly to potential threats. Ensure you designate someone internally to stay on top of alerts and notifications.
Privacy and Security Contacts (Adobe CC Documentation)
4. Manage Your Cloud Storage and Sync Settings
Syncing in Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) is beneficial but may pose a security risk for environments that allow BYOD devices in their network. It is up to each business to evaluate the impact of such a setting, determine if it makes sense to mandate the disabling of sync settings and determine which workstations would be impacted.
Set sync options (Adobe CC Documentation)
Keeping your Adobe Creative Cloud applications and connected devices up-to-date is essential for maintaining security. Adobe regularly releases updates that address security vulnerabilities, so it’s critical to apply these updates as soon as they become available. Adobe offers a Remote Update Manager (RUM) that allows admins to remotely install updates of Adobe apps – mitigating the need to log into each client machine to install updates. This applies to organizations on a Teams or Enterprise plan (and not a personal CC account).
Install updates for Acrobat and Reader Update Creative Cloud apps Use Adobe Remote Update Manager
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