HACKER Q&A
📣 DevX101

How to secure a database if employees are potential adversaries?


Many (most?) companies secure databases using some combination of password keys or limiting the db from being publicly accessible on the internet.

But if an engineer with credentials were to get phished, or were actively malicious, these methods aren't sufficient.

What's the best practice of hardening a database from internal attacks? Let's assume there are <5 people in the company who can be fully trusted.

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Where I work I don’t have a copy of the connection info for the production database at most times. I don’t want it. Maybe once a year I need to do something with it, then I get credentials from IT and I have them revoked as soon as I don’t need them anymore.
👤 orbz
Only service accounts have access to the database. Those credentials are not shared with most developers. Audit logging including calling IP address enabled. Alerts are triggered on any access out of expected account/IP address range.