USPS Fighting Back Against The Insider Threat

The Postal Service's E-Access system helps control employee access to systems and data. The single sign-on environment lets managers and database owners assign privileges to employees based on need.

The Postal Service is outpacing nearly every civilian agency in knowing who is on its network and exactly what they are doing.
With more than 220,000 employees authorized to be on its network, USPS is winning the battle against the insider threat.

"We have created over time almost a single sign-on environment which allows us to use the E-Access [application] which is where an employee submits what he wants to be allocated or authorized to against the varying applications or infrastructures. His manager will have to approve his application for those rights, and then the database owner will say it's a legitimate reason to get that information or it's not a legitimate business reason," said Chuck McGann, the service's chief information security officer. "We control the data access that way. Once that happens, [the system] will match up against the Active Directory record for that employee and put him into a particular group and put him into a particular residence factor, which turns around and says, 'Chuck now has access to the Internet or doesn't have access to the Internet,' and that is how we control our environment."

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