Understanding the Principle of Least Privilege: Enhancing Security at Financial Institutions

Cybersecurity is a necessary and fundamental component of maintaining customer trust for financial service organizations in the digital age. One of the most important elements of a successful security strategy is ensuring comprehensive control over who can access your systems.

The principle of least privilege (PoLP) is the high standard expected for financial institutions to protect sensitive customer data, prevent fraud, and reduce cyber risks.

Below, we discuss the imperative of proper PoLP implementation, the challenges modern financial institutions face, and the steps they need to take to gain—and maintain—control over every critical access point.

What Is the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)?

The principle of least privilege (PoLP) is a vital element of cybersecurity that deals with administrative privileges for an organization’s employees. PoLP dictates that every individual who uses the company’s assets (like systems and applications) should only receive the absolute minimum level of access privileges required to perform their company role.  

PoLP is an effective approach to limiting an organization’s attack surface by reducing the number of errors and malicious actions that occur based on user permissions and their access to critical data. When users are granted the least privileged access to sensitive data and systems, there’s less risk of unauthorized access. Remediating a cybersecurity breach can take less time and be managed more effectively when the list of people with specific levels of access is limited.

Due to the sensitive nature of data managed by organizations in the financial industry, utilizing the security principle of least privilege can reduce the number of internal and external attacks. 

What Is the Difference Between the Principle of Least Privilege and Other Access Control Mechanisms? 

PoLP is similar to other procedures organizations use to protect assets from cyber attacks, but there are distinctions.

Role-based access control (RBAC) assigns permissions to individual employees based on predefined roles; each role is associated with a specific set of access rights. While RBAC can be effective and is certainly better than not exercising administrative rights, it can be too generalized and provide more privileges than individuals actually use or need. 

For example, a person in a managerial role may be given blanket access to all data used by the department they manage, setting them up as an attack vector to data with which they never actually interact.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) grants users access based on factors like their department, location, job title, and similar details. ABAC can place numerous conditions on a person’s roles, including work hours and functions that specify how they can interact with a company’s assets. For example, ABAC could limit employees to viewing documents they need to access, while preventing edit access. 

The specificity ABAC provides can be fine-tuned to a granular level, but it can also be cumbersome and is still prone to providing more privileges to some individuals than is necessary. It’s possible to apply such a rigid security policy that it hinders productivity and doesn’t allow for real-world conditions people in various roles face every day.

PoLP provides a sophisticated approach to user access so that an organization doesn’t leave too much data open to potential attacks, but at the same time, it isn’t so tediously tied to policy and individual features that it is too cumbersome to manage properly.

Excessive Permissions Leave Organizations Wide Open to Potential Security Breaches

A recent study of more than 200 organizations, 18,000 cloud accounts, and over 680,000 identities revealed that 99% of users, roles, services, and resources received excessive permissions. In this analysis, these permissions were left unused and exposed for at least 60 days.

This is the precise scenario that calls for more effective identity and access management, where administrative access to systems is wide open to an attack at vectors that aren’t even necessary to the majority of users.

• In September 2023, a digital risk protection firm called DarkBeam left over 3.8 billion customer records exposed due to a data breach that mostly stemmed from an employee forgetting to reinstate password protection after maintenance.
• In December 2020, one of the largest US home healthcare services, Elara Caring, suffered a phishing attack that exposed more than 100,000 patients’ sensitive data.
• In September 2022, Uber was attacked by a hacker who gained access to all of the company’s internal systems, including emails, code repositories, and cloud storage. This all stemmed from a single employee whose login credentials were leaked to the dark web. Two-factor login access was enabled, but attackers tricked the user into sharing that data as well.

It’s clear that no matter the industry and regardless of an organization’s size, cyber attacks are most effective when exploiting the most common human instinct of letting down our guards. In each of these cases, the principles of PoLP could have prevented the attack entirely or dramatically reduced its impact.

The Importance of PoLP in Cybersecurity

The principle of least privilege minimizes unauthorized system access by reducing an organization’s attack surface, reducing the likelihood of malicious or accidental misuse of privileges from within the organization.

The financial services sector deals with people’s most sensitive personal and financial data, which is why it faces rigorous compliance and regulatory requirements.

Prevalent threats to financial service systems include:

• Insider threats: Individuals with genuine access approval can misuse their privileges to steal or leak sensitive data.
• Ransomware: Malware can encrypt all of the data in an organization and hold systems hostage unless a ransom is paid.
• Phishing and social engineering: An attacker uses emails, phone texts, or social media messages to deceive individuals into sharing sensitive access to data or trick them into unwittingly installing malware.
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks: A DDoS overwhelms an organization’s network with coordinated traffic that disrupts services, leading to a devastating lack of access to financial services for thousands or millions of people.
• Third-party risks: Financial institutions have to rely on third-party vendors to assist with customer onboarding, added security, and other services, which broadens their attack surface. Using third-party vendors is manageable when properly included as part of a thorough cybersecurity mitigation and remediation strategy, but every external connection to other teams and resources creates more potential breach opportunities.

How PoLP Helps Mitigate Risk

• Reducing an attack’s severity: If every member of an organization only has the minimum level of access they need, even a successful attacker will be limited to the level of access they can impact.
• Limiting entry points: Restricting credentials to bare necessity reduces the number of entry points for attackers.
• Protecting against privilege escalation: Attackers will typically attempt to gain higher-level access than they initially penetrated. PoLP minimizes this risk.
• Improving security monitoring: Privileges are ideally granted to only individuals who need them, reducing the number of specific assets that have to be continuously monitored. This greatly improves the chances of identifying and remediating risks with the greatest impact.

5 Steps to Implementing the Principle of Least Privilege in Financial Institutions

The following steps help organizations in the financial sector properly assess their assets and overall access vulnerabilities. These extensive processes set organizations up for successful cybersecurity mitigation and remediation.

Step 1: Conduct a Thorough Access Audit
An effective cybersecurity strategy utilizing PoLP requires a firm foundation of accurate data. You need an inventory of all employees, contractors, vendors, systems, networks, and applications.

Take this data and map access permissions and privileges to gain an understanding of user interactions with your organization’s assets. Document your findings and develop a plan for setting the most appropriate access levels for every individual.

Step 2: Assign Roles
Identify every position within an organization and consider each specific task and responsibility associated with it. Analyze what each role requires access to, including systems, applications, and data. Then, restrict access to only those items.

Create a hierarchy of roles that grant greater permissions to management but limit privileges to their specific duties without providing access to the whole department’s systems.

Step 3: Apply Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring and periodic review of an organization’s access rights can greatly reduce the likelihood of a cyber attack. Real-time monitoring helps security teams revoke outdated privileges and limit user access to the most necessary users.

Step 4: Integrate Solutions with Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Identity and access management (IAM) tools provide organizations with a centralized platform to manage individual employee identities and access rights. IAM platform solutions like Provision IAM provide automation for provisioning and deprovisioning based on employee role changes and terminations. These platforms provide workflows for access requests and approvals to improve how organizations manage security surrounding user privileges.

Step 5: Train Employees
Considering the risk surrounding sophisticated phishing and other proven effective social engineering methods, employee awareness and training are key to protecting your organization’s assets.

Training should be ongoing, always reiterating roles, responsibilities, and employee best practices. Clear policies, procedures, and expectations for individual roles lead to safer assets and improved regulatory compliance.

Training should be accompanied by ongoing monitoring of privileges, reports, and training follow-ups to ensure your organization fosters a positive security culture.

The Challenges of Implementing PoLP

While the steps to effective security privilege management are well-defined, deployment isn’t without difficulties. Employees often resist change, and stricter access controls can be inconvenient if your workforce is slow to adapt. This is even more challenging when large institutions are auditing antiquated legacy systems.

The larger the organization, the more complex the maze of IT environments security teams will have to map, which can be daunting.

PoLP Solutions

Overcoming these challenges is similar to the steps to successful implementation mentioned above. Implementing effective systems helps ensure an effective transition to better administrative rights management.

Implementing effective automated tools, conducting ongoing privilege audits, and security monitoring all help ensure your security team can maintain visibility over who has access to your different levels of sensitive data and systems.

The Benefits of PoLP for Financial Institutions

Once a PoLP process and system is in place, your organization benefits from the improved level of security in the following ways:

• Enhanced protection against insider threats and external attacks: Reducing privileges to what is necessary for each person to carry out their role limits how attackers can get through while minimizing the number of connected points of entry your security team needs to monitor.
• Improved regulatory compliance: Regulations surrounding compliance from the financial sector, including GDPR, PCI DSS, and SOX, hold organizations to a higher standard. Proper implementation of PoLP provides auditable proof your organization complies with administrative responsibilities.
• Reduced operational costs: Streamlined individual access and automated processes result in fewer cyber attack incidents while helping your security team follow through with more effective mitigation and remediation.
• Improved public trust: Financial institutions base their industry around trust. Customers need to feel confident that their private data remains safe. Cyber attacks that expose this data lead to fear that spreads across the entire industry, so trust is sustained when incidents are reduced.

PoLP and Emerging Technologies

As networks and connected applications increase in complexity, it’s essential to have a forward-thinking view of how PoLP evolves with new systems and more advanced threats.

For cloud and multi-cloud environments, PoLP helps organizations manage data that leaves their physical site so every end-point where data can be accessed is easier to protect and track.

Emerging technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) bring new, advanced possibilities for analyzing trending organization data. Gain insights on employee logging data to alert potential changes and deviations from normal activity. AI also assists in automated real-time monitoring to increase your security team’s capacity to observe access across the entire network.

Take Your Security and Efficiency to the Next Level with Provision IAM

When you apply the principle of least privilege (PoLP) to your operations, you reduce regulatory risk, improve public trust, and establish a watchful eye on your organization’s most susceptible access points for cyber attacks: your workforce and vendors.

Whether you are a community bank, a credit union, or any other financial institution, Provision IAM provides a compelling solution to meet your organization’s unique cybersecurity challenges. Meet compliance requirements by utilizing zero-trust security principles.

Our cloud-based SaaS platform eliminates the need for on-premise software management, providing immediate access updates and flexible reporting to help you continuously maintain compliance across your systems.

Ready to take control of your access security? Get in touch with our security experts today.