The EC-Council Incident Handler (ECIH) curriculum identifies excessive privileges as a major contributor to insider threats. In this scenario, Daniel had unrestricted access to all file servers, violating the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). The absence of enforcement mechanisms or alerts further indicates a lack of access governance.
Zero Trust architecture operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” It enforces strict identity verification, continuous authentication, micro-segmentation, and role-based access control. Under Zero Trust, users are granted access only to specific resources required for their job role, and all access attempts are logged and monitored.
User segmentation ensures that even administrators are restricted to only authorized systems and datasets. ECIH stresses the importance of monitoring privileged accounts, implementing least privilege, enabling access auditing, and enforcing real-time alerting for unauthorized data access attempts.
Option A (manual surveillance) is impractical and ineffective at scale. Option B (personal firewall rules) protects network traffic but does not restrict file server permissions. Option C (disabling removable media) addresses data exfiltration via USB devices, not unauthorized file access.
Therefore, user segmentation through Zero Trust access would have prevented Daniel from accessing irrelevant encrypted project files and aligns directly with ECIH insider threat mitigation strategies.
