Employee Off-boarding Process

The subject has left the organization but still has access to services or data that is reserved for employees.

A subject leaving the organisation with access to sensitive data with the intent to access and exfiltrate sensitive data or otherwise contravene internal policies.

A subject moves within the organisation to a different team with the intent to gain access to sensitive data or to circumvent controls or to otherwise contravene internal policies.

The subject violates organizational policy by allowing or enabling the use of their credentials by another individual or by using credentials that do not align with their identity and/or they are not authorized to use. 

Account sharing undermines accountability, auditability, and access control mechanisms, and is frequently linked to the obfuscation of intent, collusion, or circumvention of oversight. It is often rationalized as a convenience, but may also support broad policy evasion, unauthorized task delegation, or illicit collaboration.

The subject deliberately misuses account constructs to obscure identity, frustrate attribution, or undermine investigative visibility. This includes the use of shared, secondary, abandoned, or illicitly obtained accounts in ways that violate access integrity and complicate forensic analysis.

Unlike traditional infringement behaviors, account misuse in the anti-forensics context is not about the action itself—but about how identity is obfuscated or displaced to conceal that action. These behaviors sever the link between subject and activity, impeding both real-time detection and retrospective investigation.

• Common anti-forensic account misuse techniques include:
• Operating across multiple sanctioned accounts to fragment behavior trails.
• Using shared service accounts to mask individual actions.
• Re-activating or leveraging dormant credentials to perform access without attribution.
• Exploiting misconfigured or ghost accounts left from previous users, contractors, or integrations.

Investigators encountering unexplainable log artifacts, attribution conflicts, or unexpected session collisions should assess whether account misuse is being used as a deliberate concealment tactic. Particular attention should be paid in environments lacking centralized identity governance or with known privilege sprawl.

Account misuse as an anti-forensics strategy often coexists with more overt infringements—enabling data exfiltration, sabotage, or policy evasion while preserving plausible deniability. As such, its detection is crucial to understanding subject intent, tracing activity with confidence, and restoring the chain of custody in incident response.

Subjects may embed deferred execution logic into scripts, binaries, or automation systems to evade real-time scrutiny and frustrate future investigation. These anti-forensic techniques decouple the triggering event from the subject’s active presence in the environment—delaying execution until the subject has departed or organizational oversight has waned.

Common methods include:

• Time-Based Logic: Conditional execution paths that activate only after a predefined system date or time threshold (e.g., if (date > X)).
• Extended Sleep or Delay Functions: Use of long-duration sleep, timeout, or delay calls to stall execution for hours or days.
• Abuse of Scheduled Task Frameworks: Planting jobs in cron, Windows Task Scheduler, or enterprise orchestration systems with future execution dates, often disguised through misleading naming or non-obvious triggers.

These deferred actions are designed to blend into the environment and avoid correlation with the subject's session, user ID, or system interaction timeline. They may be used to execute sabotage, establish persistence, or exfiltrate data long after departure—frustrating incident response efforts and increasing dwell time before detection.

User credentials that were available to the subject during employment are not revoked and can still be used.

Web credentials that were available to the subject during employment are not revoked and can still be used.

Physical security credentials, such as an ID card or physical keys, that were available to the subject during employment are not revoked and can still be used.

API keys that were available to the subject during employment are not revoked and can still be used.

SSH keys that were available to the subject during employment are not revoked and can still be used.

Subjects who are issued Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) tokens, whether software-based (such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator) or hardware devices (like YubiKeys or FIDO2 devices), may retain access to systems if these tokens or devices are not deactivated upon their departure or role change.

When a subject leaves the organization or no longer needs access, failing to deactivate their MFA tokens allows them to continue authenticating to systems, potentially bypassing security controls. If a subject’s software-based MFA token remains active, they can still generate valid authentication codes unless the token is unlinked or deactivated. Similarly, if a subject retains a hardware security key, they can use it to authenticate to services as if they were still an active user.

In environments using federated authentication (e.g., SAML, OAuth), a subject’s MFA token can provide access to multiple interconnected services, allowing them to authenticate to systems they should no longer be able to access. This opens the possibility of unauthorized access even after the subject has left the organization.

To prevent this, organizations must promptly deactivate MFA tokens when subjects are removed from the network. Automating the deactivation process and regularly auditing active tokens will help close any gaps in access control. Additionally, securely managing backup MFA keys ensures that no unauthorized individual can reuse them.

The intentional or negligent disclosure of internal data, documents, or communications to members of the press or external media outlets—resulting in the loss of confidentiality, reputational harm, or operational compromise.

Media leaks represent a unique form of data loss. Unlike data exfiltration for financial gain or competitive advantage, this form of loss often involves symbolic targeting, reputational damage, or pressure tactics. Subjects may seek to embarrass the organization, expose internal misconduct, or spark public or political consequences. Leaks may be anonymous, pseudonymous, or openly attributed.

This behavior is sometimes rationalized by the subject as whistleblowing, though it often occurs outside authorized internal reporting channels and in violation of confidentiality agreements, regulatory constraints, or national security laws.

Media leaks blur the line between insider threat and whistleblowing. While some disclosures may raise legitimate ethical concerns, organizations must distinguish between protected disclosures under law (e.g., protected whistle-blower status) and unauthorized leaks that expose sensitive, regulated, or classified information.

These events often generate external investigative pressure (from regulators, media, or lawmakers) and may undermine internal trust—requiring not just forensic containment, but narrative and reputational management.

The subject leverages multiple accounts under their control—each legitimate on its own—to distribute, disguise, or segment activity in a manner that defeats identity-based attribution. This technique, referred to as account obfuscation, is designed to frustrate forensic correlation between subject behavior and account usage.

Unlike role-sanctioned multi-account use (e.g., one account for user access, another for administrative tasks), account obfuscation involves the deliberate operational separation of actions across identities to conceal intent, evade controls, or introduce ambiguity. This may involve:

• Using a privileged account to perform high-risk or policy-violating actions while maintaining a clean audit trail on the primary user account.
• Staging data using an internal identity and exfiltrating it using an external or contractor credential.
• Alternating between corporate and guest accounts to avoid continuous session logging or alerting thresholds.

This behavior is often facilitated by weak identity governance, fragmented access models, or unmanaged role transitions. It is especially difficult to detect in environments where access provisioning is ad hoc, audit scopes are limited, or account correlation is not enforced at the SIEM or UAM level.

From an investigative standpoint, account obfuscation serves as a deliberate anti-forensics tactic—enabling subjects to operate with plausible deniability and complicating timeline reconstruction. Investigators should review cross-account behavior patterns, concurrent session overlaps, and role-permission inconsistencies when this technique is suspected.

The subject employs valid credentials that were obtained outside of sanctioned provisioning channels to conceal their identity or perform actions under a false or misleading identity. This behavior, categorized as unauthorized credential use, is distinct from traditional account compromise—it reflects insider-enabled misuse, not external intrusion.

Credentials may be acquired through casual observation (e.g., shoulder surfing or unlocked workstations), social engineering, prior access (e.g., retained credentials from a former role), or covert means such as password capture tools. In some cases, credentials may be voluntarily shared by a collaborator or acquired opportunistically from unmonitored or abandoned accounts.

This tactic allows the subject to dissociate their actions from their known identity, delay detection, and in some cases, redirect suspicion to another individual. When used within privileged or high-sensitivity environments, unauthorized credential use can enable significant harm while bypassing conventional identity-based controls and alerting mechanisms.

Unlike service account sharing or account obfuscation (which involve legitimate, active credentials assigned to the subject), this behavior revolves around unauthorized access to credentials not formally linked to the subject. Investigators should prioritize this sub-section when audit trails show activity under an identity that does not correspond to role expectations, known behavioral patterns, or device history.

Key forensic indicators include:

• Activity under stale or supposedly deactivated credentials.
• Access from unfamiliar endpoints using accounts with known role assignments.
• Unusual timing or geographic patterns inconsistent with the account’s assigned user.
• Discrepancies between identity artifacts (e.g., login metadata) and session content (e.g., typing cadence, application use).

Unauthorized credential use is a high-risk concealment technique and often coincides with malicious or high-impact infringements.