In order to put a face on the depth and breadth of potential insiders that can be found throughout your enterprise, I will introduce you to three insider villains and three insider heroes. Each villain will represent one of the key misuse of privileges and each hero will represent key values delivered by least privilege. This second introduction will be of the most impactful and prevalent hero.
“Least Privilege Lucy” is your average network or systems administrator responsible for administrating systems and/or infrastructure be they are physical, virtual or cloud-based systems.
Depending on the size of your company, Lucy could be one “jack of all trades” or one hundred specialists each focused on a specific operating system, platform, geography or business unit. The unifying characteristics include one part technical wizard, one part fire fighter, one part customer service representative, one part project manager and one part CSI forensic analyst.
Least Privilege Lucy is the first person called whenever something technical needs to be done from deploying a new desktop, physical server, virtual server or application in the cloud, to upgrading software versions and patches, to rebuilding damaged systems courtesy of the latest malware attack or user “accidentally” doing something inappropriate. And let’s not forget that the CEO will also call her instead of picking up an instruction manual every time he hits the wrong key on his blackberry.
