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Scenario S-009 - Personal Data Leakage

ElementDescription
Scenario IDS-009
Target assetIdentity Management Platform / LDAP directory storing user accounts and personal data
Threat sourceExternal attacker or malicious insider with network access
Attack vectorUnauthorized bulk data extraction, directory dump, or exfiltration of PII
Potential impactViolation of GDPR, leakage of personal data, reputational damage
Likelihood🟨 Medium - LDAP services are reachable from internal hosts and bulk exports are feasible if controls are weak
Impact rating🟥 High - personal data exposure may result in heavy regulatory fines and loss of trust
Risk rating🟥 High

Mitigation:

  • Enforce strong authentication (MFA) and RBAC for all LDAP accounts.
  • Encrypt data at rest (disk-level) and in transit (LDAPS/TLS).
  • Restrict LDAP access to whitelisted hosts and subnet segmentation.
  • Enable audit logging and alerting for bulk export or abnormal queries.
  • Regularly perform data protection impact assessments (DPIA).

Owners:

  • Sec - monitoring, detection, compliance enforcement.
  • Ops - network segmentation, LDAP patching, and access controls.
  • Dev - ensure applications query LDAP securely and do not store sensitive data in clear-text.

References:

  • ISO 27001 - Control 5.1 Policies for information security.
  • ISO 27001 - Control 8.2 Privileged access rights.
  • ISO 27001 - Control 8.3 Information access restriction.
  • ISO 27001 - Control 8.16 Monitoring activities.
  • NIST CSF - PR.AC Access Control.
  • NIST CSF - PR.DS Data Security.
  • NIST CSF - DE.CM Continuous Monitoring.
  • GDPR - Art. 5 Principles relating to processing of personal data.
  • GDPR - Art. 32 Security of processing.
  • GDPR - Art. 33 Notification of a personal data breach to the supervisory authority.
  • GDPR - Art. 34 Communication of a personal data breach to the data subject.
  • EBIOS RM - Threat scenarios modeling for personal data exposure and PII compromise.

Response actions:

  • Containment - isolate LDAP host, revoke compromised accounts.
  • Investigation - determine volume and type of exfiltrated data.
  • Notification - report breach to supervisory authority (Art. 33 GDPR) and affected users if high risk (Art. 34).
  • Remediation - rotate credentials, enforce stricter access controls, review audit logs, and update monitoring rules.