Administrative Access
Administrative access is a level of system permission that allows someone to make high-impact changes to a website or supporting service.
Administrative users can usually do significantly more than routine editors or contributors.
What Administrators May Be Able to Do
Depending on the system, an administrator may be able to:
- Add or remove users
- Install Plugins
- Change Themes
- Modify integrations
- Change billing
- Export data
- Change DNS
- Delete content
- Change configuration
- Manage API credentials
- Deploy code
- Change security settings
This makes administrator access operationally important.
Least Privilege
A useful security principle is least privilege:
Give a user or system only the permissions required to perform its intended work.
OWASP describes the Principle of Least Privilege as limiting users, programs, and processes to the minimum permissions necessary for their required tasks. OWASP: Principle of Least Privilege
This is the same principle behind User Roles & Permissions in the Website CMS collection.
Admin Access vs. Ownership
Having administrative access does not necessarily mean owning the system.
A contractor may have administrator permissions to perform maintenance.
The organization can still retain account ownership, billing control, and account recovery.
That separation makes Website Ownership much healthier.
Shared Accounts
Shared administrator accounts make it difficult to know:
- Who changed something
- Who still knows the password
- Who should be removed
- Which actions belong to which person
Where systems support individual users, individual accounts are usually easier to manage.
Common Problems
Common problems include:
- Everyone is an administrator
- Shared credentials
- Former staff retain access
- Contractor owns the only administrator account
- Accounts lack multi-factor authentication
- Integrations use unnecessarily broad permissions
- No regular access review
How to Improve
Periodically review:
- Who has access
- What level they have
- Why they need it
- Whether the account is still active
- Whether multi-factor authentication is configured
- Who controls recovery
Remove permissions that are no longer required.