One of the biggest issues that auditors discover is that application users are granted inappropriate access. This is due to multiple reasons. Most employees ask for more access than they need to do their job thus leading to excessive privileges. A typical product or service company is in a mad rush to innovate and deliver newer products and services. Unfortunately, often times in hate to meet project timelines, managers lax the access governance rules. Most often than not these mistakes are attributed to manager’s lack of understanding of organization policies and procedures rather than willful omission.
Cloning new employee’s user access after another employee is another anti pattern. Say Jenna, a new hire, has her access modeled after Jody, who has been in the company for ten years. Unless Jody’s privileges have been right aligned to her current role, Jenna will have excess privileges into systems, file shares etc.
Poorly designed roles can also lead to access issues such as too much or too little access being granted. Roles should be aligned with business processes rather than specific users or jobs. Auditors have found situations where contractor is assigned a role which should be only ready only. However, as a part of the annual SOX audit, this role was found to have write capabilities as well.
Below are few leading practices from Auditor’s point to view to help organizations implement better security, efficiency and compliance.
Formalize Process For User Access Review: Audit findings can lead to monetary loss and tarnish reputation. Organizations must have a formal process — collect data across all applications periodically, application owners review user entitlements and formal documentation of any remediation. Manual access review, though not ideal, is better than not having one.
Enforce Segregation of Duties (SOD) & Least Privileges: Every role and entitlement should be created with least privileges and evaluated for SOD violation. Giving people minimum level of access that they need to do their job ensures there is no policy violation down the road. Auditors are looking for evidence that SOD controls are in place to prevent fraud.
Special Treatment for Privileged Accounts: Once a cyber criminal gets past the endpoint it is only a matter of time before they gain access to privileged accounts. Every organization must adopt a zero-trust mindset for these accounts. Privileged account creation, modification and deletion should be codified as an automated process. Many auditors recommend creating privileged account with a predefined expiry date. Above all access to these accounts should be evaluated periodically to know who has access to what.
Manage Adhoc Privileges: Users working on special projects may need evaluated privileges. Auditors recommend that such requests be throughly vetted in scope (read, write etc) and duration for which the access is needed.
Maintain Proof Of Compliance: Auditors require proof of compliance to finalize the audit. Organization need to ensure documentation exist for audit trails etc. If there were any audit findings in the previous year and have not been remediated, auditors recommend organizations maintain this documentation.
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