The effectiveness of access controls

admin
March 11, 2010

With all due respect to Varonis and access controls in general (Just the area of Sharepoint is a fertile market for data security), the problem of internally-launched attacks is that they are all done by the “right” people and / or by software agents who have the “right” access rights.
There are 3 general classes of internal attacks that are never going to be mitigated by access controls:
Trusted insider theft
A trivial example is a director of new technology development at a small high-tech startup who would have access to the entire company’s IP, the competitive analyses, patent applications and minutes of conversations with all the people who ever stopped in to talk about the startup’s technology. That same person has access by definition but when he takes his data and sucks it out the network using a back-door, a proxy, an HTTP GET or just a plain USB or Gmail account – there is no way an Active Directory access control will be able to detect that as “anomalous behavior”.
Social engineering
Collusion between insiders, gaming the system, taking advantage of friends and DHL messengers who go in and out of the office all the time with their bags.
Side channel attacks
Detecting data at a distance with acoustic or Tempest attacks – for example. or watching parking lot traffic patterns….

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