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January 10, 2024
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Segregation of Duties: Preventing Data Breaches Through Access Controls
Whether via social engineering, stolen credentials, or malicious insider access, data breaches often involve exploitation excessive user privileges. By adhering to the principle of segregation of duties and implementing least privilege access, organizations can protect sensitive data assets.
This guide outlines pragmatics steps security leaders can take to reduce insider threat risk through advanced access controls.
Segregate Security Process Duties
The first priority is identifying sensitive processes like financial transactions or data access which could be exploited if under single-person control.
Mitigating this risk involves:
Documenting key duties across end-to-end workflows.
Determining sensitive tasks to segregate across multiple users.
Assigning complementary duties to separate personnel.
Well-designed separation of process tasks limits data breach impact from compromise of any one account.
Rotate Job Duties
While segregating transactions reduces risk, additional assurances are prudent given personnel turnover and evolving roles.
Proactive access governance calls for:
Developing policies and schedules for periodic duty rotation across positions.
Ensuring staff receive adequate cross-training for rotating roles.
Budgeting for third-party segregation of duties audits.
By refreshing duties across users, organizations limit windows for fraud and increase visibility into potential compliance gaps.
Enforce Mandatory Vacations
An additional mechanism to identify control gaps is requiring regular vacation leave during which acting assignees cover missing staff.
Vacation enforcement enables:
Reassignments affording oversight of existing access and transactions.
Isolation of processes for audits ensuring adherence to policies.
New vantage points to spot potential segregation of duty conflicts.
Mandating leave underscores robust access controls that withstand scrutiny even in a primary holder’s absence.
Through emphasizing least privilege access, segregating high-risk assignments, proactively rotating duties, and requiring periodic vacation leave, security leaders can implement layered access governance providing data protection even from internal actors.
For additional guidance, explore resources like the SANS Segregation of Duties Cheat Sheet overview.
We hope this post helped in understanding the segregation of duties and preventing data breaches through access controls. Thanks for reading this post. Please share this post and help secure the digital world. Visit our website, thesecmaster.com, and our social media page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram, Tumblr, Medium, and Instagram and subscribe to receive updates like this.
Arun KL
Arun KL is a cybersecurity professional with 15+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, cloud security, vulnerability management, Penetration Testing, security operations, and incident response. He is adept at designing and implementing robust security solutions to safeguard systems and data. Arun holds multiple industry certifications including CCNA, CCNA Security, RHCE, CEH, and AWS Security.
