I was reading an edition of PenTest Magazine (attached here for convenience). They’ve had a few decent articles in there, but one was talking specifically about securing your users. That’s an interesting topic. An attack against your company is very likely to come through the “meatware” vector. It’s often much easier then trying to find the latest 0-day or buffer overflow. Of course you have your security policies and user training, but even the security pros fall for a well crafted phishing attack. Your expectation of the extent that you’ll be able to harden and train your userbase should be limited. You need to be prepared for a breach to come through that direction.

A lot of defenses should be focused on isolating the user population from critical systems, so that when a breach does occur, the impact is limited. Of course users do need some access in order to perform their jobs and that’s where it’s critical to focus on granular access controls, specifically RBAC. You also need to have the capacity to detect and respond to any anomalies in user behavior. That’s what ultimately will allow you to contain the threat and limit it’s impact.