Intent Versus Actions And Least Privilege

Insider threats are a global phenomenon. Every company in every part of the world is subject to some level of insider threat. And guess what? Insider villains are just as unidentifiable in the UK as they are in the US. They appear just as innocuous in Poughkeepsie as they do in Perth. You’ve invested in information technology and the associated infrastructure, applications, databases and peripherals to assist your company in becoming competitive, ease administration and satisfy reporting and compliance mandates. You’ve made decisions on physical servers and desktops. You’ve decided on what to virtualize for cost saving and improved capacity planning. You may have moved some of that infrastructure to a public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure. You’ve hired an incredible team of employees and implemented IT security solutions to keep hostile outsiders from accessing your mission critical systems. You’ve passed most, if not all of your IT audits and have certificates to prove regulatory compliance. But, are you confident that you’ve avoided the potential of showing up in the next Wall St Journal article on insider breaches? Have you prevented good people, trusted employees, from doing bad things, intentionally, accidentally or indirectly? If you have employees with excessive privileges or access to sensitive data then they are at risk of intentionally, accidentally or indirectly misusing that privilege and potentially stealing, deleting or modifying the data. There is a very fine line between intent and action, especially when excessive privileges on IT resources is involved.