Every company has workers that have been there from the beginning and worked in every department. Knowledge of the company’s processes makes them valuable employees, but they can also access and put at risk lots of sensitive data. Regular user access reviews can help you mitigate this risk and safeguard your critical assets. Regularly reviewing user access is an essential part of access management. In this article, we discuss the nature and importance of user access audits and briefly overview IT standards and laws that require you to perform such audits. Arm yourself with a user access review checklist and best practices to make the audit process as efficient as possible.
A user access review (or user access audit) is part of the user account management and access control process, which involves periodically reviewing access rights for all of an organization’s employees and third parties.
It is an important process because it involves the re-evaluation of:
The ultimate objective of a user access review is to reduce the risk of a security breach by limiting access to critical data and resources. It often happens that some security officers are tempted to skip and do away with the review if they are confident that practices such as the principle of least privilege, zero trust architecture, and granular access management are in place.
However, lack of access audits leads to incidents that are similar to the Cash App Investing breach carried out by an ex-employee. In this case, the perpetrator accessed and downloaded internal Cash App reports with information on over 8 million current and former application users.
Conducting a User Access Review can help you mitigate the following issues:
Privilege creep occurs when employees obtain access to more sensitive data than required while working at an organization. New privileges appear as employees gain new responsibilities and access rights without revoking the old ones.
Privilege misuse is when an insider uses granted privileges in a way that is different from or opposite to the intended use. Such actions may be unintentional, deliberate, or caused by ignorance. But no matter their cause, they often lead to cybersecurity threats.
Privilege abuse is a fraudulent activity that involves an account with elevated privileges. Malicious actors may abuse privileges they were granted to access, exfiltrate, compromise, or damage an organization’s confidential assets. Malicious insiders can abuse their privilege. As well, outside attackers can compromise privileged accounts and use their privileges for malicious purposes.
During an access review, a security officer synchronizes users’ access rights with users’ current roles and limits employees’ privileges to keep the risks of privilege creep, misuse, and abuse at a minimum.
Apart from mitigating cybersecurity threats, conducting a user access review is essential for complying with many IT requirements.
As is often the case with cybersecurity, companies may encounter certain challenges here as well. Regularly reviewing user access may pose such difficulties to organizations:
What standards, laws, and regulations require a user access review? Now that we have just touched the subject of regulatory requirements, it’s time to delve further into the realm of IT compliance standards. Reviewing user access rights is required by many international IT security regimes, including:
A user access review can be swift, effective, and painless if you keep your access control policies up to date and implement globally and industry-recognized security procedures. We’ve gathered six best practices for advancing your organization’s user access reviews.
When you bring us on board, our team at Aspire High Consultants works to unlock the power of the User Access Review Process for your organization. In consultation with you, we devise the ultimate checklist to ensure that users have the proper level of access to applications, data, and systems. In this way, Aspire High Consultants enables compliance while safeguarding your sensitive business data.
Aspire High Consultants is a boutique IT Risk Solution consulting firm currently engaged in the business of providing risk management solutions in specific domains
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