Separation of Duties

4th February 2020 | Cybrary

Separation of Duties involves dividing roles and responsibilities to minimize the risk of a single individual subverting a system or critical process without detection.

The classic example used in Separation of Duties is the United States’ government which is broken up into three branches of government (Legislative, Executive, and Judicial). This was the wisdom used by the founding fathers so that one branch did not hold all the power to govern the people, not even the US president. This is called “separation of powers”; similarly in business, the Accounts Payable is often separated from the Accounts Receivable to “separate duties” and require collusion for company funds to be misappropriated.

What Should My SMB Do?

If you own a business, you need to be doing these things to protect your sensitive information:

Govern employees with policies and procedures. You need a password policy, an acceptable use policy, an information handling policy, and a written information security program (WISP) at a minimum.
Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks. Adopt a Learning Management system like CyberHoot to teach employees the skills they need to be more confident, productive, and secure.
Test employees with Phishing attacks to practice. CyberHoot’s Phish testing allows businesses to test employees with believable phishing attacks and put those that fail into remedial phish training.
Deploy critical cybersecurity technology including two-factor authentication on all critical accounts. Enable email SPAM filtering, validate backups, deploy DNS protection, antivirus, and anti-malware on all your endpoints.
In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections, etc) or prohibiting their use entirely.
If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.

Most of these recommendations are built into CyberHoot. With CyberHoot you can govern, train, assess, and test your employees. Visit CyberHoot.com and sign up for our services today. At the very least continue to learn by enrolling in our monthly Cybersecurity newsletters to stay on top of current cybersecurity updates.