Excessive Permissions: Risks, How to Find Them and How to Fix Them

Excessive permissions are access rights that a user, administrator, app or service account holds beyond what its job needs: a sales rep who can open payroll files, an intern in the Domain Admins group, a laptop user who is a local administrator, an integration with write access to every mailbox. They build up quietly through privilege creep, and they turn one stolen password or one wrong click into a much bigger incident. You find them with an access review of admin groups, roles and shared data, and you fix them by removing what is not used, moving people onto roles, and making admin rights temporary.

If an audit finding or an admin group that keeps growing is why you are here, start with how to find excessive permissions; the risks section is there to help you make the case for the cleanup.

What are excessive permissions?

A permission is excessive when nobody can explain why the account needs it today. The access may have been right once, for a project or a previous role, but it stayed after the reason went away. Common examples:

• Local administrator rights on laptops. Users who can install anything, turn off security tools and change system settings.
• Oversized admin groups. Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins or Global Administrator in Microsoft Entra ID with more members than the team that runs them.
• Broad data access. Shared drives, SharePoint sites and SaaS workspaces open to "everyone" or to whole departments.
• Service accounts and integrations. Accounts created for one script or app, given admin rights to make setup easier, and never reviewed.
• App and API scopes. Third-party apps connected with OAuth that can read every mailbox or file, when they need one folder.
• Cloud roles. Owner or administrator roles in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud handed out where a narrower role exists.

The opposite of excessive permissions is the principle of least privilege: every account gets the minimum access its task needs, for as long as it needs it.

How excessive permissions build up: privilege creep

Privilege creep is the slow growth of access over time. Nobody decides to give a user too much; access is added for good reasons and rarely taken away. It usually happens in a few predictable ways:

• Role changes. Someone moves from finance to operations and keeps the finance access as well as getting the new one.
• Temporary access that never expires. Admin rights granted for a migration, an audit or an urgent fix stay in place after the work ends.
• Copy-a-colleague provisioning. A new hire gets "the same access as Sam", including everything Sam collected over five years.
• Shared admin accounts. One admin login used by several people, so nobody can tell who needs it and nobody wants to change its password.
• Admin by default on endpoints. The first account on a new laptop is an administrator, and the device is handed over that way.
• Offboarding gaps. Accounts in apps outside the main directory stay active after the person leaves.

Each step is small. Together they leave a directory where many accounts can do far more than the business intends, which is why reviews have to be regular rather than a one-off cleanup.

Why excessive permissions are a security risk

The original version of this post listed ten risks. They come down to these:

• A bigger blast radius for stolen accounts. Attackers use whatever access the compromised account has. A phished standard user is a contained problem; a phished user with admin rights over servers or mailboxes is not.
• Ransomware and lateral movement. Ransomware spreads with the permissions it finds. Local admin rights and broad network shares let it disable protection and encrypt far more than one laptop. See privileged access management best practices.
• Insider misuse. A departing or unhappy employee with access to customer lists or payroll data can copy it without breaking any technical control.
• Costly mistakes. The more people who can delete, reconfigure or share sensitive data, the more likely someone does it by accident.
• Weaker visibility. When many accounts can make the same change, logs stop telling you much, and unusual activity is harder to spot.
• Audit and compliance findings. Least privilege appears in almost every framework: NIST SP 800-53 control AC-6, ISO/IEC 27001 Annex A controls on access rights and privileged access, the SOC 2 logical access criteria and the HIPAA access controls all expect access to match the job, and reviewers check admin groups first.
• Single points of failure. When one person holds every admin right, their absence or departure becomes an operational risk as well as a security one.

How to find excessive permissions

Excessive permissions detection is mostly an access review: list who has access, compare it with what their role needs, and check what has not been used. Start with the accounts that can do the most damage.

1. List every privileged group and role

Begin with the groups and roles that grant administrative control, and count their members. On a Windows PC, list the local Administrators group:

Get-LocalGroupMember -Group "Administrators"

In Active Directory, list the members of the most powerful groups, including nested groups:

Get-ADGroupMember -Identity "Domain Admins" -Recursive | Select-Object Name, SamAccountName
Get-ADGroupMember -Identity "Enterprise Admins" -Recursive | Select-Object Name, SamAccountName

On a Mac, the admin group shows which local accounts are administrators:

dscl . -read /Groups/admin GroupMembership

On Linux, check who can use sudo (the group is sudo on Debian and Ubuntu, wheel on Fedora and RHEL):

getent group sudo wheel

In Microsoft Entra ID, open Roles & admins in the Microsoft Entra admin center and review who holds Global Administrator and the other privileged roles. Do the same for the admin roles in Google Workspace, your cloud provider and each important SaaS app.

2. Compare access with the job

For each person, ask their manager or the system owner a simple question: does this person need this access for the work they do now? Write the answer down. An access review template keeps the evidence in one place, which is also what an auditor will ask to see.

3. Look for access nobody uses

Unused permissions are the easiest to remove. Useful signals:

• Accounts with no sign-in for 60 or 90 days, especially admin accounts.
• Admin roles that have not been used for an admin action in months.
• Cloud tools that report unused access, such as AWS IAM Access Analyzer and the role recommendations in Google Cloud IAM.
• Service accounts whose owner has left, or whose app was retired.

4. Check shared data and app scopes

Review sharing on drives and sites that hold sensitive data, links shared with "anyone", and the third-party apps connected to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with broad scopes. These rarely show up in a group review but often hold the data that matters most.

How to fix excessive permissions

Fixing excessive user permissions is a mix of cleanup and changing how access is granted, so the problem does not grow back.

1. Remove what is not needed. Take out unused access first; it is low risk and shrinks the review for next time. For anything you are unsure about, disable before you delete and set a date to check.
2. Move people onto roles. Grant access through roles that match job functions (helpdesk, endpoint admin, finance reader) instead of one-off permissions per person. Role-based access control makes reviews faster because you review the role once, not every user.
3. Separate daily and admin accounts. Admins use a standard account for email and browsing and a separate admin account only for admin work.
4. Make admin rights temporary. Just-in-time access grants elevated rights for a set time and removes them automatically. Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management does this for Entra and Azure roles.
5. Take local admin away from users. Make everyday users standard users on Windows, Mac and Linux, and give them a way to get the apps they need without admin rights. On Windows, Windows LAPS gives each PC a unique local admin password that rotates, so one shared password cannot open every machine.
6. Keep two break-glass accounts. Emergency admin accounts, protected with strong MFA, stored securely and monitored, so you are not tempted to leave extra admins in place "just in case".
7. Close the offboarding gap. Remove access in every app when someone leaves, not only in the directory. An IT offboarding checklist helps.

Excessive permissions on endpoints

Local admin rights deserve their own attention because they are the most widespread case. A user who is an administrator on their own laptop can install unapproved software, turn off disk encryption or antivirus, and give malware the same rights. The usual reason they keep admin rights is that they need to install or update apps. Deploying those apps centrally removes that reason. For Macs, see Mac administrator accounts and how to let standard users install programs on a Mac.

How to keep permissions from creeping back

• Review on a schedule. Privileged access every quarter, everything else at least twice a year, and always after a reorganization.
• Tie access to joiner, mover and leaver events. When someone changes role, remove the old access as part of the same request that grants the new one.
• Put an end date on temporary access. Ask for one on every request, and remove the access when the date passes.
• Alert on changes to admin groups. On Windows, security event 4732 records a member added to a security-enabled local group and 4728 one added to a global group; forward them to your log tool and review them.
• Require approval for new admin rights. A second person signing off is a simple check that stops most "just give me admin" requests.

Managing this across many devices

Least privilege applies to the IT team's own tools too. In trio.so, IT staff get console access through roles, with one to three roles per person: built-in roles such as Endpoint Admin, Patch Operator, Service Desk Agent or Auditor, or custom roles you define for your own team. And trio.so deploys apps to enrolled Macs: App Store apps through Apple MDM and uploaded installers, so users never need an admin password for them. See Apple device management.

Related reading: the least privilege access model and privileged access management best practices.