The Principle Of Least Privilege is an essential tenet in information security that forms its cornerstone, supporting confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA triad).
These systems offer many benefits to an organization, including minimizing its attack surface, stopping malware propagation, increasing operational performance and decreasing human error. Let’s take a look at how they achieve these objectives.
Need to Know
One key principle of cybersecurity is providing users with only the minimum access necessary to complete their task, known as least privilege or defense in depth — this approach strikes a balance between user productivity and security protection to safeguard critical data and systems.
Many data breaches involve hackers gaining privileged credentials and then moving laterally across your network to gain administrative rights, otherwise known as privilege escalation. You can reduce risk by following the principle of least privilege.
Receptionists at health insurance companies shouldn’t have access to patient records that contain sensitive medical information, while maintenance technicians working on your industrial control system (ICS) shouldn’t have full access to all hardware in the plant – instead, a need-to-know policy should limit them only to parts they need for repair and maintenance purposes.
The principle of least privilege can also help stop malware from spreading across your network by restricting how many accounts a malicious actor can infiltrate. An attacker that gains entry through one user account with limited permissions would only gain access to that particular piece of data; but by contrast, access to an administrative account would give them the power to infect all connected devices at once.
Applying the principle of least privilege can quickly mitigate Insider Threat and the chance of someone disclosing sensitive data to media outlets. Edward Snowden leaked millions of classified NSA files due to his access to highly confidential documents; had he only had access to view or modify certain files, this risk may have been eliminated.
Implementing the principle of least privilege can be challenging when dealing with existing accounts, particularly if there are multiple users. An identity and access management solution that automatically evaluates, revokes and grants temporary privileges to both human and non-human users can help your organization apply this rule without disrupting user productivity or jeopardizing compliance and security measures.
Separation of Duties
Separation of duties is an effective cybersecurity measure designed to reduce cyberattacks and fraud by assigning tasks among multiple people. Furthermore, this strategy promotes accountability, transparency, and ethical behavior; helping organizations meet regulatory requirements as well as avoid legal or reputational risks related to financial misconduct.
Implementing the principle of least privilege is a crucial part of the separation of duties. By following it, IT and security teams can ensure that users only access privileges necessary for them to fulfill their jobs or system functions – helping ensure critical systems can only be accessed by trusted individuals, and prevent untrustworthy employees from gaining administrator access and potentially perpetrating harmful acts against organizations.
Enforcement of the principle of least privilege can be challenging when many users require access to sensitive information and systems resources for their jobs, often including inheritance privileges from group memberships. Automated provisioning, regular audits of privileges and tracking permissions across systems will assist in the pursuit of least privilege in your IT environment.
Maintaining an appropriate privilege level can help improve productivity by decreasing troubleshooting requests and non-essential tasks, as well as increase IT infrastructure security by decreasing malware attacks. Most malware infections start off as an email scam with malicious links before spreading through other accounts and permissions until eventually becoming impossible to contain with a least privilege approach slowing their spread so rogue insiders are caught and prevented from creating havoc in your IT environment.
Assuring compliance with the principle of least privilege can be challenging when managing IT environments with hundreds or thousands of users, but identity access management (IAM) tools that grant user access based on groups and roles as well as granting and revoking permissions at both an individual and application level provide an effective solution to ensure you achieve and maintain least privilege while staying compliant with industry regulations and standards.
Confidentiality
The Principle of Least Privilege (POLP) ensures that any user account, computing process, or system only has access to those permissions necessary to fulfil its intended function – for instance a backup user should only be permitted to create backups and not install new software or modify permission settings. When implemented effectively, POLP lowers an organization’s attack surface and risk exposure.
Preventing malware from spreading across an entire network and causing greater damage is also key; rather than spreading to every corner of a system at once, its presence will remain contained to its initial point of entry, limiting how much harm can be done by any individual attack.
Every business that deals with digital assets or sensitive information can benefit from applying the principle of least privilege. Though its implementation can be challenging, its numerous benefits include improved system stability and operational functionality, greater fault tolerance and enhanced work productivity.
Hackers frequently gain entry to an organization’s systems through compromised privileged credentials. Once inside, an attacker uses that access to gain further entry in order to escalate privileges progressively through the system and ultimately reach administrator rights – this type of cyber attack is known as privilege escalation.
Implementing the principle of least privilege at all levels can help protect against such attacks by ensuring no one has more access than necessary for their task.
Implementing the principle of least privilege has another significant security benefit – speeding up discovery of insider threats within an organization. Rogue insiders tend to enjoy more trust from their colleagues and possess greater knowledge about the environment than outsiders, making it harder for security officers to detect them. Therefore, applying it at all levels of the company is vital in guarding against such dangers.
While the principles of least privilege offer numerous security advantages, their implementation must be in tandem with other security controls and policies such as cybersecurity awareness training, OPSEC, data loss prevention and more to fully reap its benefits. Human error is usually behind data breaches; nearly 90 percent are caused by employee mistakes alone! By adopting principles of least privilege and providing training on best practices an organization can greatly decrease its risk of costly mistakes being made by their staff members.
Integrity
This principle helps reduce an organization’s cybersecurity attack surface by restricting user privileges to what’s necessary to perform their jobs, as well as restricting malware infection by preventing hackers from exploiting vulnerabilities on one endpoint and using that access point to penetrate into other parts of their network.
Least privilege reduces an employee’s exposure to cyber attacks by protecting them from becoming targets of spear phishing attacks targeting their job duties and gathering personal information on them – this is crucial as one attack could quickly escalate from being minor and easily manageable into something with serious legal, financial and reputational repercussions.
An effective way to enforce the principle of least privilege is through privileged access management solutions that discover all admin accounts across an enterprise and centrally manage them through policy controls. This includes all users, local admin accounts, system accounts, SSH keys, Windows and Linux groups, DevOps secrets as well as default and hard-coded passwords. By setting these accounts with default privileges and only elevating when needed for specific tasks or specific users – this principle can be enforced without negatively affecting employees or business operations.
Privileged Access Management solutions also allow administrators to restrict users’ access to files and resources they require in order to complete their tasks, such as reading/modifying but denying delete/overwrite files. They may even grant temporary elevation of privileges in order to complete specific tasks more safely thereby minimizing damage or data theft risks.
Implementing the principle of least privilege can shorten the time needed to identify and fix security issues, since it allows an easy way of identifying any privileges not necessary for job performance. By decreasing an employee’s attack surface and cutting down on time spent fixing or mitigating issues, application systems become safer overall.
As well as mitigating risk, the principle of least privilege can also help organizations save money. According to Forrester Research, data breaches cost organizations an average of $3.92 million without factoring in lost brand loyalty and revenue due to compromised credentials; with 80% of breaches occurring when privilege credentials were compromised due to theft. Implementing least privilege can help safeguard against data breaches as well as malicious activities that might otherwise incur costly monetary or regulatory sanctions.