Cloud Compliance Blog

Insider Risk: Now More Than Ever

It should come as no surprise that the current economic climate has increased the risk of fraud from insiders. But the degree to which the insider threat problem has increased is a surprise, as described in a Dark Reading article Bankers Gone Bad: Financial Crisis Making The Threat Worse. According to a new survey by Actimize, nearly 80 percent of financial institutions worldwide say the insider threat problem has increased in the wake of the economic downturn. Only 28 percent of financial institutions had not suffered an insider breach in the past 12 months (not including the breaches we don't yet know about).

How do insiders commit fraud? The profile of the bank fraudster that typically commits these crimes is a trusted, full-time employee, one who is well-versed in its operations and how to circumvent them and remain under the radar. And a favorite method is to use a dormant account resulting from excessive user entitlements:

"Some security measures for limiting user access to sensitive data, such as minimizing user privileges, don't apply cleanly for banks... The best thing they can do is proactively monitor and look for signs that user entitlements aren't being abused."

If looking for signs that user entitlements aren't being abused was possible, everyone would do it, right? Well, it has to be cheap, too: according to the survey, the biggest single challenge to meeting the threat is the cost of doing so.

In the past 12 months, 70 percent of financial institutions say they have experienced a case of data theft by one of their employees. Nearly half of the banks in the Actimize survey say they are losing 1% to 4% -- four percent! -- of their total revenues to insider fraud. With that as incentive, the most plausible explanation for failing to prevent fraud resulting from excessive user entitlements is that banks don't know how. What they do know is that perfect access control isn't possible, and that Identity Management (IdM) systems combined with manual reviews still fails to identify many excessive entitlements.

And they also know that excessive entitlements (also known as excessive access rights) was the top audit finding for the past two years.

Cloud Compliance is developing an Identity and Access Assessment (IdAA) solution to manage entitlements (also called privileges, or access rights). We identify users with excess entitlements, and provide tools for isolating high levels of over-entitlement by group, business unit or by application. Such tools enable root cause identification, and provide the necessary insight for remediation and process improvement. Furthermore, due to our global visibility as a cloud-based SaaS solution, we capture statistics industry-wide that our customers can access for setting their own policy benchmarks. Finally, the Cloud Compliance SaaS solution requires no software to install, maintain and operate, no appliances to deploy, no consultants, advisors or professional services to deploy, and no huge upfront capital expense to incur.

Is Perfect Access Control Possible?

Bruce Schneier, the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT and a highly regarded security guru, engaged in a point/counter-point debate with Marcus Ranum in an Information Security Magazine article entitled Schneier-Ranum Face-Off: Is Perfect Access Control Possible?

The question is particularly relevant today, especially in light of the fact that, as I've reported here and here, excessive access rights were the top audit finding over the past two years. Why is that? The general consensus is that organizations should implement a role-based access control (RBAC) system to manage entitlements. But as Schneier points out:

RBAC is very hard to implement correctly. Organizations generally don't even know who has what role. The employee doesn't know, the boss doesn't know--and these days the employee might have more than one boss -- and senior management certainly doesn't know.

Ranum seems to argue that at least part of the problem is that we're paying for decisions made over the past decade to make critical data easier to access and where it can be managed more cheaply, and that many of these decisions were incompetent and negligent.

What both Schneier and Ranum agree on is that over-entitlement is the norm today, and these excess entitlements -- also called excessive access rights -- represent a security and compliance exposure.

So where does that leave us? Based on what I've seen and the customers I've spoken to, I have to agree with Schneier's assessment:

In the end, a perfect access control system just isn't possible; organizations are simply too chaotic for it to work.

If RBAC systems are so hard to implement correctly, and even if doing so still leaves the organization with excessive access rights and their associated risks and vulnerabilities, what can be done? As I've suggested in my prior post, user activity monitoring in the form of an Identity and Access Control solution can complement RBAC identity management systems by providing feedback that uncovers excess entitlement in the form of dormant (aka zombie) accounts. Therefore, even if RBAC is very hard to implement correctly, and a perfect access control system just isn't possible, at least the organization can gain visibility into and remove the vulnerabilities and compliance exposure associated with excessive access rights.

Cloud Compliance is developing an Identity and Access Control (IdAA) solution as referred to above. We identify dormant accounts, and provide tools for isolating high rates of dormancy by group, business unit or by application. Such tools enable root cause identification, and provide the necessary insight for remediation and process improvement. Furthermore, due to our global visibility as a cloud-based SaaS solution, we capture statistics industry-wide that our customers can access for setting their own policy benchmarks. Finally, in contrast to software-based IdM solutions, the Cloud Compliance SaaS solution requires no software to install, maintain and operate, no appliances to deploy, no consultants, advisors or professional services to deploy, and no huge upfront capital expense to incur.