Privilege creep in Microsoft 365: The silent risk you’re probably ignoring

You don’t need a breach to have a security problem. Sometimes, it’s not an outside master hacker or a similar movie-like event. More often than not, it’s the slow buildup of access permissions granted in good faith, forgotten over time, and never reviewed. That’s privilege creep, and if you’re managing a Microsoft 365 (M365) environment, it’s probably happening right under your nose. And it’s a problem.

You can think of it like mold. For various reasons, it will slowly but surely accumulate, and if you don’t take care of it, water (in our case, data) will seep through the cracks.

What is privilege creep?

Privilege creep, also called access creep, permissions creep, or privilege sprawl, quietly expands your organization’s attack surface by granting users more access than they need. 

Privilege creep happens when users accumulate more access rights than they need to do their jobs. It’s not always the result of bad practices, just normal day-to-day operations and the passing of time.

• Someone changes roles, but their old access never gets revoked.
• A user is granted temporary access “just for a project” and the owner simply forgets to circle back later to remove the access.
• Teams get added to SharePoint sites, and suddenly, dozens of people have access they shouldn’t.

It’s slow. It’s silent. But over time, it turns your environment into a mess of over-permissioned users and associated unwanted risks.

Why is privilege creep is a big problem in Microsoft 365?

Privilege creep is a problem in Microsoft 365 because M365 was designed for collaboration. Anyone who’s worked with Teams, SharePoint, or OneDrive knows how easy it is to share content, grant access, or create a new workspace. Unfortunately, the ease of collaboration M365 offers is the main source of the problem.

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that 60% of breaches involved the human element, including privilege misuse, user error, and credential abuse.

Without tight controls and constant oversight, it’s easy for permissions to sprawl. Access reviews are manual and often skipped. Self-service tools empower users to share without understanding the risks. Nested groups and inherited permissions make it impossible to see who actually has access to what.

How does privilege creep happen?

There are a lot of ways privilege creep can creep up on you and your M365 environment. Here’s a couple of them, I’m sure you’ve seen some if not all:

• Employees switch roles or departments and receive new privileges and access without anyone removing the previous ones.
• The IT department forgets to deactivate the account of a former employee and remove their privileges; it happens.
• Internal users share sensitive data without IT’s knowledge.
• Managers generously provide their employees with credentials to privileged accounts so that they do not have to go through the IT department.
• Employees need temporary privileges to do a task, but those privileges are not removed after the task has been completed.
• By accident

Keep in mind that the list above doesn’t even mention external sharing, which is a whole other can of worms.

The risk you can’t see coming

Privilege creep doesn’t crash your system or trigger alerts. It just sits there, quietly expanding your attack surface day by day. Until something goes wrong:

• A disgruntled employee downloads confidential data.
• A compromised account quietly exfiltrates information.
• A compliance audit reveals excessive access and no clear trail of accountability.

You might think, “It hasn’t happened yet, so we’re fine.” But that’s not how risk works. The longer privilege creep goes unchecked, the more damage it can do, when it finally does.

How to stop privilege creep?

Organizations need to audit and review access regularly to prevent privilege creep. They need to check privileges to ensure users have enough access to do their jobs and remove any access they do not need.

You can’t fight what you can’t see. That’s where Syskit Point comes in.

Syskit Point gives you a centralized, detailed view of who has access to what across Microsoft 365. No more blind spots. No more assumptions.

With Syskit Point, you can easily stop the spread, you can:

• Detect and clean up over-permissioned users
• Automate access reviews with smart reminders to quickly do some governance in a user-friendly interface.
• Identify high-risk access in Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365 Groups.
• Prove compliance with audit-ready reports.

It’s built for IT teams that don’t have time for guesswork and can’t afford the fallout of unchecked access.

You don’t have to wait for a wake-up call

Privilege creep isn’t exciting. It won’t make headlines. But when it leads to a data breach, compliance fine, or board-level incident, you’ll wish you handled it sooner.

Start by getting visibility and then take control. Syskit Point can help you do both. Without drowning in PowerShell scripts, spreadsheets or Microsoft Entra.