Organisations often keep users overprivileged because it is convenient for routine operations, then leave those entitlements in place during absences and holidays. That creates unnecessary attack surface if an identity is compromised. A better approach is to right-size access, certify entitlements, and move sensitive permissions into just-in-time workflows so elevated access exists only when needed.
Why peak leave periods expose weak privilege hygiene
Holiday cover often pushes teams to preserve access rather than re-evaluate it. That is where standing privilege becomes a habit, not a necessity: temporary coverage turns into permanent entitlement, and “we will remove it later” usually means after the window has already closed. The practical failure is not just excess access, it is excess access with no active business case.
During leave peaks, organisations also tend to rely on informal delegation, shared knowledge, and exception handling. That creates a brittle model where the person covering work inherits more authority than they need, but less accountability for how it is used. The result is a wider blast radius if either the substitute account or the original identity is compromised.
The pattern is especially visible in environments that already struggle with NHI lifecycle governance, because over-assignment is often treated as an operational shortcut. A right-sized model should not depend on memory, manager discretion, or post-holiday cleanup.
What least privilege looks like when staffing is thin
least privilege is often misunderstood as a one-time role design exercise. In practice, it is a recurring access decision that must survive planned absences, backfill arrangements, and time-bound operational pressure. If the control cannot adapt to those conditions, teams usually relax it instead of fixing it.
Peak leave periods are a good test of whether access is genuinely governed or merely tolerated. The best indicator is whether elevated permissions can be moved into just-in-time workflows and removed automatically when the task ends. Where that is not possible, organisations should at least narrow scope by system, environment, and duration rather than handing out broad standing access.
Survey data underscores how costly over-permissioning becomes when access is left broad by default: the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey reports a 17% incident rate for least-privileged systems versus 76% for over-privileged systems. The lesson is not that holidays create the problem, but that leave periods expose whatever entitlement discipline already exists.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Peak leave periods create predictable windows where entitlement drift, delayed reviews, and delegated access combine. If a privileged account or unused entitlement is compromised while controls are relaxed, the attacker inherits access that was never meant to be continuously available.
Failure mechanism: organisations preserve standing privilege to avoid operational friction, then fail to revoke or scope it tightly when coverage changes. That leaves dormant but usable permissions in place, which can be abused through account takeover, token theft, or misuse of a substitute user’s broader access.
Impact: the immediate effect is expanded attack surface and weaker accountability. The downstream effect is faster lateral movement, harder incident containment, and a greater chance that a routine absence becomes a security event.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC — Access Control | Least privilege and timed access are core access-control outcomes for this question. |
| GV.RM — Risk Management Strategy | Peak leave overprivilege is a repeatable governance and risk issue. | |
| Recommendation — Enforce least privilege and time-bound access reviews before leave periods begin. Treat leave-period privilege drift as a governed access-risk scenario. | ||
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | 3.4 — Least Privilege | The answer depends on shrinking standing access and limiting blast radius. |
| Recommendation — Apply least-privilege enforcement to remove standing access during coverage gaps. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | 6 — Access Control Management | This topic centers on restricting and reviewing access rights and privileges. |
| Recommendation — Restrict, review, and remove unnecessary access before planned absences. | ||
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Overprivileged Non-Human Identities | Overprivileged identities and stale access are the exact failure pattern described. |
| NHI-04 — Secret Rotation and Lifecycle | Leave periods often extend the life of access material beyond its needed window. | |
| NHI-08 — Identity Visibility and Inventory | You cannot certify or right-size access without knowing which entitlements exist. | |
| Recommendation — Reduce standing privilege and scope elevated access to the minimum task window. Rotate or expire access material when temporary coverage ends. Inventory privileged entitlements and certify them before holiday coverage starts. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: treat leave season as an access-control stress test. The accounts to review first are those with production change rights, data export rights, approval bypasses, and any entitlement that can approve or create more access.
Decision rule: if access is needed only for a specific backfill task, grant it for the shortest viable duration and remove it automatically. If the entitlement would be uncomfortable to leave active on a permanent basis, it should not survive the absence window by default.
What to verify: confirm that managers and control owners can show who approved the temporary access, when it expires, and how revocation is validated. If that evidence does not exist, the organisation is relying on intent rather than control.
Practitioner takeaway: peak leave periods do not create a privilege problem, they reveal one. The most reliable pattern is to make elevated access temporary, reviewable, and narrowly scoped before the holiday period starts, not after the return-to-work backlog.
