The Concept of Least Privilege and Methods to Provide It (Essay Sample)

PRINCIPLE OF LEAST PRIVILEGE
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Principle of Least Privilege
Introduction
In Information Security, the least privilege principle directs that any program, user, or process should only perform tasks accessed only by the system’s minimum requirements for a particular user or program. For instance, any program aimed at mining data from a database should not require the system administrator’s permission to perform the task. In addition to this, if a programmer is entitled to perform updates on an organization’s legacy codes, the individual should not access any information concerning financial records (Hammad et al. 2017). The least privilege principle is considered the best practice for any organization in implementing Information Security systems. Therefore, this argumentative essay will discuss the concept of least privilege in Information Security and how to implement the principle.
The Concept of Least Privilege and Methods to Provide It
The principle of least privilege operates to allow the system to provide access to the individuals or programs that are enough to perform the required task. In the case of an organization’s Information Technology databases, the principle of least privilege is critical in ensuring that the database systems are well secured from hackers and other malicious individuals from accessing vital information through masquerading a low user account. Applying the least privilege concept allows organizations to trace and stop system compromisation from their area of origin, ensuring that the entire database system is not vulnerable to hackers (Hammad et al. 2017). The following paragraphs illustrate some of the methods that organizations can apply to provide the concept of least privilege.
Creating user accounts with the least privilege is one of the methods of providing the concept. This means that any user within the organization should have an account limited to the specific task the individual is entitled to perform (Kern and Anderl 2018). For instance, if there is an employee within an organization whose job is entering records into an organization’s system, the user account should be designed to allow the employee to access only data entry tasks to the database. This will ensure that if the employee clicks on a malicious program and the computer is hacked, the hacker will only access the database’s data entry system. However, if an immediate response to the threat is not initiated, the hacker could access the entire system.
Another method ensures that organizations acquire MySQL accounts that possess the least privilege features (Kern and Anderl 2018). The entire MySQL setup involves a vast application of the least privilege principle since it can employ different accounts to sort out different obligations within a system. To ascertain this, an organization with online forms that allow its users to sort data should only use a MySQL file that is entitled to allowing sorting functions within the system only, and there should no other function beyond sorting files. By doing this, the organization ensures that the hacker will only manage to access sorting functions in any event that the online forms are hacked.
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