Imperva White Paper Sample

When users (or applications) are granted database access privileges that exceed the requirements of their job function, these privileges may be abused for malicious purpose. For example, a university administrator whose job requires only the ability to change student contact information may take advantage of excessive database update privileges to change grades.

A given database user ends up with excessive privileges for the simple reason that database administrators do not have the time to define and update granular access privilege control mechanisms for each user. As a result, all users or large groups of users are granted generic default access privileges that far exceed specific job requirements.