SoD requires more than one person to complete a task. It’s why regulators and organizations use separation of duties (SoD) to protect against this kind of abuse. This exploitation type often results in far more damage than typically possible from a single individual. Malevolent collusion: This can occur when two or more bad actors coordinate malevolent activities.

Least privilege is a primary security approach to limit the range of damage or abuse can inflict on an organization. Inside bad actors can be contractors, employees, and even administrators and all levels of management.

Malevolent insider: This threat type is often difficult to detect, with harmful activities easily going months or years unnoticed.

In their 800-12R1 introduction into information security, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) points to common concerns addressed by least privilege:

Least-privilege access is a security strategy focused on ensuring that identities, people, and processes are granted the minimum level of permissions needed to be productive-or in the case of programmatic access, functional. What Types of Threats are Best Addressed Through Least-Privilege Security? This approach allows you to tie specific resource access policies to the people and programs accessing them. While initially discussed as part of a network security strategy, applying zero trust security to the application layer for consumable resources (applications, services, data, etc.) is far more effective. Least privilege is a foundational tenet of zero trust security, with the core philosophy to grant only as much access as necessary.

Principle of least privilege policy