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CR-IA-04Level 2 · Cohort

Dormant privilege, unusual login

People whose privileges have gone unused for 90 or more days and who then signed in from an unusual context.

Classification

Risk domain One of 9 areas of human risk, from social engineering to readiness and response. Every signal belongs to one.
Cohort class
  • High-impact
Difficulty
  • Hard

A cohort is Easy when every one of its signals is available from standard connectors, Medium when any signal needs setup and none needs an integration or a survey, and Hard when any signal needs an integration or a survey.

Dimensions Every signal answers one of 3 questions.
Evidence level
Maturity practices One capability a program performs, scored on its own: See, Understand, Act, Prove, Govern and Culture.
Leads to The kind of breach the evidence beneath it points toward, each anchored to a Verizon DBIR or VERIS pattern or an FBI IC3 category.
NIST CSF 2.0 (from its signals)
  • DE.CM-03
  • PR.AA-05
MITRE ATT&CK (from its signals)
  • T1078
  • T1078.004

The definition, in detail

Definition

Privilege nobody uses is privilege nobody watches, and an odd sign-in is often its first use.

Example

A former project lead kept database admin rights after moving teams; last week the account signed in from a new country at 03:00.

How it is measured

Formula
IA-B-04 + IA-A-03
Class
High-impact
Difficulty
Hard: at least one signal needs an integration or a survey
Sources
Identity provider & MFA, IGA, PAM & entitlements

How it is used

Programs count the people who match IA-B-04 + IA-A-03 at once as a high-impact cohort in Identity and access, trend that population, and point the response at it; it feeds 1 breach scenario.

Membership is evidence that the signals in the formula describe the same person at once. It is a population to act on; on its own it confirms no incident.

Continue exploring

Cite this term

"Dormant privilege, unusual login" (CR-IA-04), Human Risk Management Framework v2.0.0, Living Security, CC BY 4.0. https://www.humanriskmanagement.com/taxonomy/cohorts/cr-ia-04-dormant-privilege-unusual-login

Part of the open HRM Taxonomy, CC BY 4.0. Download the taxonomy as JSON · Version history. This page describes one cohort.

The initial assessment

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18 questions, about 4 minutes and nothing to type before the result: your level, a score for each practice and three first playbooks, each Easy, Medium or Hard.

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