RE: Permissions and rights for security professionals inside organizations

[sharon_joyner () timeinc com]

In an ideal world, where the ideal separation of duties is possible,
security professionals who only do security administration should not
have full access to business data and should only be able to modify
permissions.  Of course, this means that they could grant permission to
themselves for sensitive data, but administrative tasks should be
audited to mitigate the risk.  

Unfortunately, most systems are Microsoft or Unix and this separation of
duties is usually impractical.  Auditing administrative tasks is
therefore mandatory to mitigate the risk of admins doing bad things.

Sharon Joyner, CISSP
IS Security Administrator
Warner Publisher Services
9210 King Palm Drive
Tampa, FL  33619
Tel: 813-664-8147 Fax: 813-664-8195
 


-----Original Message-----
From: acrypto [mailto:acrypto () comcast net] 
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 1:50 AM
To: security-basics () lists securityfocus com
Subject: Permissions and rights for security professionals inside
organizations


A policy and or procedure question: 
I am curious to know what levels of access security professionals are
granted inside organizations. Should the security team maintain
administrative and root type access for all systems? Should there be a
process by which they can obtain this level of access at any time if
they don't maintain it constantly? Should security professionals be
limited to only read access but to all data? Or, should security
professionals only have access upon request for any system, data, or
resource? Are there any policies or best practices that address this
issue?  

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide,   

acrypto  


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to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
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