Don’t Let Your Cloud Security Catch a Bad Case of Permission Creep

Cloud security teams are often blind to one of the biggest threats to cloud environments: a web of over-privileged identities that create pathways for attackers. Learn how to regain control of your cloud identities by automating the enforcement of least privilege across your environment.

Here’s a common scenario: An organization has invested much effort and money to secure its multi-cloud environment, yet it has overlooked a critical area: excessive permissions. As a result, the cloud security team is blind to critical issues such as:

• Zombie admins: Remember the senior engineer who resigned earlier this year? Her account with AWS administration-level privileges is still active, providing a direct path to the organization’s most critical infrastructure.
• Ghost contractors: The third-party team hired to build a big-data analytics platform finished the project last year. They’re gone. But guess what’s is still around: Their role with read/write access to all datasets and storage buckets.
• The "just-in-case" service accounts: The CI/CD pipeline uses a service account to deploy new application instances. This account has permissions for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), so it can not only create servers – it can also delete or modify any server in the entire account. Yikes.

In this blog post, we’ll look at why organizations struggle with excessive permissions, and we’ll explain how you can prevent this identity-management problem from endangering your multi-cloud environment.

The silent, pervasive problem of permission creep

If you have to protect an environment that’s partly on-premises and partly in multiple cloud platforms, identity is your new perimeter. Every human user, service account and third-party integration represents a potential entry point. When these identities accumulate more access rights than they need – a common yet severe problem – you end up with permission sprawl. Needless to say, attackers stand ready to exploit this massive, hidden attack surface.

The principle of least privilege – granting only the minimum permissions necessary for a task – represents the gold standard for securing these identities. But in dynamic, multi-cloud environments, adopting it is easier said than done.

Why preventing excessive permissions is such a challenge

Excessive permissions rarely happen intentionally. They build up over time through a process of "permission creep,” as illustrated by the hypothetical example we outlined earlier.

A single compromised account with standing, excessive privileges can be the starting point for a devastating attack. Attackers use these permissions to move laterally across your environment, escalate their own privileges and ultimately find and steal your most sensitive data. The worst part? Most organizations lack the visibility to even know it’s happening until it’s too late.

From manual chaos to automated control

If you’re trying to right-size permissions manually, you’re playing a frustrating and never-ending game of whack-a-mole that you’ll never win. With fragmented visibility across AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes, it’s nearly impossible to answer a simple question: "Who has access to what, and do they actually need it?" Relying on multiple, siloed tools only exacerbates the problem, creating blind spots that attackers can easily exploit.

To truly enforce least privilege at scale, you need a new approach that combines comprehensive visibility with intelligent context and powerful automation. This is where a modern cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) becomes essential.

Achieve least privilege with Tenable Cloud Security

The goal isn't just to find risky permissions; it's to eliminate them proactively and systematically without slowing down your operations. Tenable Cloud Security, powered by the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, provides the clarity, context and control needed to enforce least privilege across your entire hybrid, multi-cloud footprint.

It achieves this through three core pillars:

1. Comprehensive identity discovery: Tenable Cloud Security continuously and agentlessly maps every single identity across your environments. It identifies their effective permissions, detects orphaned accounts and flags unused roles, giving you a complete and always-current inventory of your identities.
2. Contextual risk correlation: A user with admin access to a non-critical development server is a concern. However, a service account with excessive permissions to a database containing sensitive customer data can trigger a crisis. Tenable One correlates identity risks with other exposures like software vulnerabilities, system misconfigurations and sensitive data locations. This provides crucial context, allowing you to focus on the most dangerous attack paths first.
3. Automated enforcement of least privilege: Tenable Cloud Security not only detects excessive permission problems; it helps you fix them at scale. You can define custom policies to restrict admin privileges or enforce multi-factor authentication. More importantly, it can automatically revoke unused permissions, tighten overly broad identity and access management (IAM) policies or trigger just-in-time (JIT) access workflows. This ensures privileges don't overstay their welcome, drastically reducing the window of opportunity for attackers.

Take back control of your cloud identities

In our hypothetical example, here’s how Tenable would immediately help the organization get a handle on their cloud identity chaos:

• Tenable instantly flags the zombie admin account as a high-risk, dormant identity with excessive privileges, and the cloud security team deactivates it with a single click.
• The contractor's role is identified as a critical threat to the cloud data stores. Using Tenable, the cloud security team generates a new, right-sized IAM policy based on the permissions required by the role. This policy becomes their template for all contractors.
• Every single permission in the CI/CD service account is surfaced, pinpointing the permissions it needs and the ones it doesn’t use, so they can be adjusted accordingly.

By transitioning from a state of persistent, excessive access to a model of "just enough, just in time" permissions, Tenable helps you boost your security posture by enforcing least privilege, yielding you benefits like:

• Reducing the attack surface: Eliminate the pathways attackers use for privilege escalation and lateral movement.
• Strengthening access control: Prevent data loss by ensuring no identity has more access than it absolutely requires.
• Simplifying compliance: Continuously demonstrate and enforce access governance against standards from organizations like the Center for Internet Security (CIS), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
• Securing DevOps at scale: Embed entitlement checks directly into CI/CD pipelines so new identities start with secure, minimal permissions by default.

Don't let excessive permissions become the keys that attackers use to breach your cloud environment. Reclaim control over your cloud identity perimeter.

Ready to learn more? Click here to see how Tenable Cloud Security can help you discover, prioritize, and remediate risky permissions to achieve true least privilege at scale.