Access control is a security term used to refer to a set of policies for restricting access to information, tools, and physical locations. Typically access control falls under the domain of physical access control or information access control. This article will focus on the latter. Access control is a method of guaranteeing that users are who they say they are and that they have the appropriate access to company data.

At a high level, access control is a selective restriction of access to data. It consists of two main components: authentication and authorization, says Daniel Crowley, head of research for IBM’s X-Force Red, which focuses on data security. Authentication is a technique used to verify that someone is who they claim to be. Authentication isn’t sufficient by itself to protect data, Crowley notes. What’s needed is an additional layer, authorization, which determines whether a user should be allowed to access the data or make the transaction they’re attempting.

A data breach is the intentional or unintentional release of secure or private/confidential information to an untrusted environment. Other terms for this phenomenon include unintentional information disclosure, data leak, information leakage and also data spill. Incidents range from concerted attacks by black hats, or individuals who hack for some kind of personal gain, associated with organized crime, political activist or national governments to careless disposal of used computer equipment or data storage media and unbackable source.

How Breaches in Access Control Happen

Now that we know what Breaches in Access Control is, we also got to know how the Breaches happen. According to FoxPass there are There are several types of access control breaches that can cripple organizations and expose valuable information. Here they are:

• Privilege Misuse

Privilege misuse is thus one of the most common, yet the most dangerous types of access control breaches. This Type of breaches is one of the significant types of access control breaches occurs by the hands of the employees within an organization. Perhaps You can deploy the best access control system for your organization, but a malicious employee can easily misuse their privilege to gain access to the most critical data of the organization. Your employees can know exactly the location of your data and the loopholes in the access control mechanism.

Even with standard user privilege, a user can access the memory of all processes running under a user account. An employee can easily integrate malicious code in the user processes, access the backdoor of the system, intercept keystrokes, and also modify the content in the browser. Standard user privileges are suitable enough to allow a user to download a plugin and integrate a backdoor and keylogger to the system.

• Negligence

People make mistakes all the time. Hence, it is not wrong to assume that someone with managerial access to company data can make a dumb mistake when it comes to data handling. Keeping valuable data or equipment unattended is another critical mistake most people tend to make, thus leading to security and data breaches within the organization.

Rogue employees or snooping outsiders can take advantage of this negligence, access the critical data of the organization, and pose a severe threat to security.

• Domain Attack

Domain accounts allow users to access the network services of a corporate network. The access to network services is usually provided by default to domain accounts. Hence, if an infected user or a malicious insider has access to the corporate database, then it is easy to breach the corporate data.

Domain access and authorization also allow attackers to access the network disks and network folders of the user, share the internal resources, and even gain access to other workstations in the same network.

• Outsider Breach Due to Poor Access Control Mechanisms

A poor access control mechanism causes outsiders to gain unauthorized access to organizational data. Outsider breach can be attributed directly to a lack of proper access control mechanism. Sometimes, admin privileges can be poorly monitored within an organization.

• Accidental Web Exposure

Organizations are migrating more and more data to the cloud today. With the introduction of cloud-based architecture, the possibility of accidentally exposing critical information to the web increases significantly.

• Remote Worker Breaches

Remote workers are becoming critical to businesses these days. Therefore, remote worker breaches are becoming popular every passing day. There are two cases when remote work can serve to pose a threat to organizational security: