The key objective of any CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) is the prevention of impact to the organization from any form of security breach. This, as we know, is much easier said than done. A good CISO, in fact, comes to work every morning assuming that a breach has already happened, with a view to fixing any vulnerabilities and securing the system to the highest standard possible. Every single day.
In the military, they have a well-known phrase that happens to succinctly describe the definition of the least privilege principle: ‘Need-To-Know Basis’. For the military, this means that sensitive information is only given to those who need that information to perform their duty. In cybersecurity, it’s much the same idea. The ‘least privilege’ principle involves the restriction of individual user access rights within a company to only those which are necessary in order for them to do their job. By the same token, each system process, device, and application should be granted the least authority necessary, to avoid compromising privileged information.
There have been quite a few security breaches to hit the news in 2018. As each story broke, it seemed like it couldn't get worse, only to find that the next data breach was just around the corner, and even more severe, exposing the data of millions of customers worldwide. We have had a few of those this year.
