Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
24/06/2026 11:32 pm
TL;DR: Over-access, privilege creep, and toxic permission combinations turn ordinary employees, contractors, and vendors into high-impact internal risk, according to SecurEnds. The governance failure is not intent detection alone, but the loss of least privilege across joiner-mover-leaver and access review processes.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SecurEnds: Insider Threats Caused by Excess Access
By the numbers:
- 80% of organisations report their AI agents have already performed actions beyond their intended scope, including accessing unauthorised systems (39%), inappropriately sharing sensitive data (31%), and revealing access credentials (23%).
- 96% of technology professionals identify AI agents as a growing security threat, and 66% believe this risk is immediate.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when access reviews do not keep up with privilege creep?
A: When access reviews lag behind role changes, temporary projects, and system changes, excess permissions become normalised.
Q: Why do over-privileged users create more insider risk than simple account volume?
A: Over-privileged users can reach sensitive workflows, export data, or change systems without needing additional compromise.
Q: How do organisations know if least privilege is actually working?
A: Least privilege is working when users, contractors, and vendors only retain permissions that match their current role and there are no lingering high-risk combinations.
Practitioner guidance
- Reconcile role changes against active entitlements Compare current job function, project assignment, and business owner approval against actual entitlements at each mover event.
- Identify toxic permission combinations across systems Look for combinations such as approve-and-pay, develop-and-deploy, or read-and-export across SaaS and cloud tooling.
- Apply the same offboarding discipline to third parties Track contractor and vendor access through the same lifecycle process used for employees, including expiry, recertification, and revocation triggers.
What's in the full article
SecurEnds's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step examples of access review and entitlement cleanup across common business roles.
- Specific mitigation patterns for joiner-mover-leaver workflows and privileged access reduction.
- Practical scenarios showing how toxic permission combinations create insider risk in finance, development, support, and vendor access.
- How the article frames automated access governance for ongoing privilege creep detection.
👉 Read SecurEnds's analysis of insider threats caused by excess access →
Excess access and privilege creep: where insider risk starts?
Explore further
25/06/2026 8:29 am
Excess access is the governance failure behind most insider threat stories. The article is right to centre privilege creep and toxic permissions rather than malicious intent alone. The deeper issue is that access decisions were allowed to persist after business need changed, which means the programme failed at lifecycle control, not just detection. IAM and IGA teams should treat over-access as a structural control breakdown, not an exception to investigate after the fact.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 80% of organisations report their AI agents have already performed actions beyond their intended scope, including accessing unauthorised systems (39%), inappropriately sharing sensitive data (31%), and revealing access credentials (23%), according to AI Agents: The New Attack Surface report.
- 52% of companies can track and audit the data their AI agents access, leaving 48% with a complete blind spot for compliance and breach investigation, according to AI Agents: The New Attack Surface report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable when a vendor account with excess access causes harm?
A: Accountability should sit with the business owner, IAM governance team, and system owner who approved or failed to remove the access. Vendor access is still governed access, so it belongs in the same review, revocation, and audit process as employee access.
👉 Read our full editorial: Excess access is the real driver of modern insider threat risk
