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:

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:

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:

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.  

You may also like these articles: