Privileged Account Discovery

What is Privileged Account Discovery?

Managing privileged accounts can feel like navigating a maze. When these accounts aren’t properly tracked, the risk of overflowing privileges grows, creating an opening for cybercriminals. Threat actors can gain unauthorised access to sensitive data and disrupt critical systems. That’s why keeping your privileged accounts secure is essential.

The first step is to discover the elevated user accounts, where Privileged Account Discovery (PAD) comes in.

Privileged Account Discovery is vital part in a comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution that helps organisations identify, categorise, and manage all privileged accounts across IT infrastructure. It provides the visibility needed to protect these critical assets and lets you strengthen security posture.

Let’s explore how you can protect your organisation’s most important assets with Privileged Account Discovery.

Why is Privileged Account Discovery Important?

Often organisations create backdoor accounts as a contingency measure. These are secret accounts that allow users (usually administrators) to gain access to resources while bypassing usual authentication procedures in emergency situations. Because these accounts are created for rare cases, they aren’t well-documented, controlled, or subject to audit. And due to that fact, they lead to unauthorised access, data breaches, and other security incidents.

Lack of visibility for undetected accounts with overflowing privileges creates a major security blind spot, leaving organisations vulnerable to attacks that target these accounts.

Automation: The Key to Continuous Privilege Awareness

Automating the process of Privileged Account Discovery helps uncover backdoor accounts (among other privileged accounts) by identifying accounts with abnormal activity, suspicious permissions, or unusual access patterns.

The automation eliminates human efforts and provides continuous visibility into privileged accounts. This ensures that organisations are always aware of their privileged access landscape.

The auto-discovery and management capabilities, saves time and remove administrative complexity, while ensuring that new privileged assets are almost immediately brought under control.

Privileged Account Discovery in Active Directory (AD)

In Windows-based IT environments, Active Directory (AD) serves as the repository that manages and organises information about network resources, such as computers, users, groups, and other devices. The key account types in Active Directory include:

User Accounts: These accounts represent individual users in the network. Each user account has a unique username and password used for authentication and authorization purposes.

Computer Accounts: Each computer that joins the AD domain has a corresponding computer account. These accounts help manage and secure computer resources within the network.

Group Accounts: Groups are collections of user accounts, computer accounts, or other special groups. They simplify the administration of permissions and access control. Groups can comprise users who can have common permissions rather than having to assign them individually.

Service Accounts: Service accounts help run services and processes in the background, often without requiring user interaction. They provide a way to isolate and control the permissions of services for security purposes.

Organisational Units (OUs): While not exactly accounts, OUs are containers within AD that can hold user accounts, group accounts, computer accounts, and other OUs. In essence, OUs organise and manage objects within the directory.

And the most important ones,

Administrative Accounts: These accounts with elevated privileges allow administrators to perform various tasks, such as managing AD, configuring servers, and handling other administrative functions. Examples include Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, and more.

To streamline management and enhance security, organisations often delegate varying levels of privileged access to numerous accounts, groups, and organisational units (OUs) within Active Directory.

From the all-powerful Domain Admins to delegated administrators and from computer accounts to non-local service accounts, most of the privileged access is centralised within AD. This includes passwords, security groups, and policies, creating a substantial reservoir of default and delegated privileged access within AD.

Consequently, individuals within various IT teams assume responsibility for the efficient management and security of these accounts.

Users granted any form of privileged access in AD inherently possess privileged status, and their level of access often rivals that of Domain Admins, tremendously increasing the risk of cyberattacks. This highlights the crucial need to identify these privileges to protect them.

Why to Discover Scattered Privileged Accounts Before Implementing a PAM Solution?

PAM helps organisations manage, monitor, and control privileged access within their IT environments. Before implementing a PAM solution, it’s crucial for companies to perform account discovery and identify discover scattered privileged accounts. This holds true for several reasons, such as:

Compliance Requirements: Identifying scattered privileged accounts through account discovery helps organisations meet compliance requirements set by multiple regulatory bodies and demonstrate a commitment to security best practices.

Effective PAM Implementation: Understanding the landscape of privileged access allows organisations to define proper policies, implement necessary controls, and ensure that the PAM solution adequately addresses their security needs.

Reducing Attack Surface: Performing account discovery and consolidating privileged accounts helps reduce the attack surface by limiting the number of accounts with elevated permissions. This makes it much easier to monitor and manage access to critical systems and data.

Use Cases of Privileged Account Discovery

As you can gauge by now, the two most important use cases where Privileged Account Discovery is critical are:

1. Addressing Blind Spots:

We established earlier that Privileged Account Discovery helps address blind spots. Now, identifying blind spots comes in different forms. For instance:

Discovering where you use the passwords, particularly the ones with no expiration dates. Passwords typically expire periodically to mitigate the risk associated with compromised credentials. If certain passwords don’t have an expiration timeline, it becomes a potential security vulnerability, as attackers can exploit these credentials indefinitely.

Finding covert access points established by administrators in the form of backdoors mentioned earlier. This highlights the significance of pinpointing and rectifying these concealed vulnerabilities to thwart unauthorised access.

Preventing potential security lapse where a privileged account, like the “Administrator” account, is employed across diverse service accounts linked to different applications. This practice poses security concerns because if one service account is compromised, it can provide unauthorised gateways to the entire system.

2. Compliance

Regulatory bodies such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS, require adherence to their cybersecurity standards. Most security standards mandate the security and management of privileged access. This is a legal requisite and is essential for maintaining customers trust and brand reputation.

Privileged Account Discovery helps in compliance by identifying and managing privileged identities and enables organisations meet specific access control requirements.

In addition, compliance often involves rigorous auditing and reporting. Privileged Account Discovery provides the necessary visibility into how elevated accounts are used and managed within an IT environment. This information helps generate comprehensive reports on the status and usage of privileged access and facilitates transparency and accountability.

Continuous Discovery with Sectona

Sectona offers a robust and easy-to-use Security Platform to help enterprises protect IT assets and privileged accounts.

With Sectona, you gain deeper discovery capabilities to manage dependent services and SSH keys and reduce integration time through schedulers and automated onboarding rules. The process becomes effortless as you leverage comprehensive asset discovery techniques, including network scans, AWS and Azure resource discovery, VM ware, Hyper-V resource scans, and Active Directory synchronisation.

Moreover, as you uncover local and service accounts, you can take charge by classifying and vaulting the hidden privileged accounts. All in all, Sectona ensures continuous discovery with automatic account discovery, synchronises Active Directory, dynamically groups assets, and more, making security management a breeze.

Further reading: Privileged User Activity Monitoring for Better Visibility