Best Practices to Protect Data Against Privilege Abuse

System admins can be dangerous. Wondering how? Keep reading!

A system administrator’s role is to maintain your IT operations, ensure system performance, and keep your organization compliant with enterprise data security requirements. They have complete control over the ins and outs of your databases.

That’s why you need to pay close attention to admins’ actions to prevent privilege abuse and preserve enterprise data privacy and integrity.

What is the role of a System Administrator?

The role of a System Administrator (SysAdmin) is crucial in managing and maintaining the IT infrastructure of an organization. Their key responsibilities include:

• Preventing data loss.
• Managing users and user access privileges.
• Providing technical support to end-users and colleagues within the organization.
• Managing and ensuring the protection of database-related network infrastructure.
• Supervising database operations.
• Monitoring performance.
• Performing backup and recovery.
• Ensuring compliance with IT policies, standards, and regulations relevant to data security and privacy.

SysAdmins’ responsibilities involve a wide range of tasks related to system management, user support, security, and infrastructure maintenance. However, unmanaged privileges can expose organizations to risks of privilege abuse.

Could system administrators pose a risk to your enterprise data security?

The answer is YES. System administrators could potentially pose a risk to your enterprise data security through Privilege Abuse.

Privilege abuse refers to the misuse or exploitation of elevated access privileges granted to users within an organization’s IT infrastructure. This typically occurs when individuals with privileged access misuse their authority for unauthorized activities that can potentially compromise security, violate policies, or cause harm to the organization.

While system admins are not the only elements that could be behind privilege abuse, they are one of the highest-risk attack vectors. Here is how:

• They have excessive privileges that are often necessary for performing their duties. However, if these privileges are not properly managed or monitored, administrators may have more access than necessary, increasing the risk of misuse or abuse.
• Administrators may abuse their privileges by accessing sensitive data or systems beyond what is required for their job roles and misuse their access to steal or leak sensitive data.
• SysAdmins could make unauthorized changes to system configurations, security settings, or user permissions.
• Administrators with high privileges can install unauthorized or malicious software on systems, potentially compromising security.
• In some cases, administrators may abuse their privileges to bypass security controls or monitoring mechanisms to cover their tracks while engaging in unauthorized activities.
• While most administrators are trustworthy professionals, insider threats can arise if an administrator becomes disgruntled or acts maliciously. They may use their privileged access to sabotage systems, disrupt operations, or cause financial harm to the organization.