Looking back over the past 6 years, and being focused primarily on cloud security with organizations of all sizes and complexity, it is not a stretch to say that most are doing it wrong. One of the biggest problems companies face regarding security is excessive privileges, yet most do not focus enough on this; which is to their own detriment. For example, in AWS, there are over 10,000 different IAM actions. These permissions include read, write, and management actions. With all this complexity and lack of focus on cloud identities as a fundamental part of a modern security program, I see time and time again huge risks in people’s clouds due to over-permissioned cloud Identities. All a bad actor would need is to leverage one of these overly permissive identities and it is game over. That being said, don’t worry there is hope.With the right focus and approach, you can discover and manage the Identity risk in your cloud.  

The Principle of Least Privilege has always been a central tenet of any security program and in the cloud, it takes on an increased level of importance. Simply put, it means granting an Identity only the bare minimum privileges needed to perform its intended function. On the flip side, it also includes providing the bare minimum of access privileges to your data. In the cloud, this applies not only to people, but also to non-people entities such as Roles, Service Principles, virtual machines, data stores, and serverless functions.  

Read more at – Leveraging Least Privilege in Data Breach Management