Privileged Access Management (PAM) can be defined as an IT security strategy that ensures the appropriate control of access to critical data and resources. It involves securing and managing privileged accounts, controlling the scope of privileged access granted to users, and governing all privileged activity carried out in the organization.
PAM safeguards privileged identities and gives them just enough access to do their day-to-day activities without a hassle. Implementing a PAM solution helps organizations minimize their overall attack surface and mitigate security risks due to internal and external threats.
Summary on how PAM works:
With all accounts consolidated and access secured, PAM protects sensitive data and systems from unauthorized administrative access, modification or misuse.
In computer technology, privileges are special permissions assigned to users so they may carry out modifications to sensitive data, systems, applications, and networks. Examples of privileges include - the permission to install new software, ability to delete an existing user, power to approve access to a server, etc.
Any login credential which grants privileges or administrative rights to systems and applications is known as a privileged account. These accounts can be associated with human users and non-human entities such as application and machine identities.
Privileged accounts can be of different forms/types. In an enterprise IT environment, these accounts exist in the form of administrator accounts, superuser accounts, root accounts, local administrator accounts, domain administrator accounts, secure socket shell keys (SSH keys), service and application accounts. These high privilege accounts are also called ‘secrets’ from a DevOps context.
There are seven types of privileged accounts each with different levels of access. They are
Domain admin account have the highest level of access among the types of privileged accounts. These accounts have access to all the servers, applications, and accounts, and workstations. These possess privileges to modify the access rights of every admin account of systems within the particular domain and need to be restricted as much as possible.
Any standard user account that has been granted elevated privileges is called a privileged account. They are essential for handling critical data and systems, but if utilized improperly, they pose serious security risks. Properly maintaining these accounts is essential to prevent unauthorized access and safeguard critical resources.
IT workers commonly use local administrative accounts, which provide administrative-level access to specific computers, to maintain endpoints, servers, network devices, databases, and other systems. These accounts are popular targets for cybercriminals looking to establish first access to a company's network and then move laterally within it as local admin accounts frequently use the same password across multiple devices.
Applications and services use service accounts to make sure operating systems work properly and softwares run effectively. Depending on the needs of the application, these accounts may have domain admin privileges in certain cases. Even though service accounts aren't usually permitted to access systems, they frequently have passwords that are never changed or expire. Therefore, hackers commonly use these accounts as the target of attacks.
An emergency account is considered a break glass account where the user can view all the accounts and credentials but can’t access it. Emergency accounts are activated to recover or restore the accounts in case of disasters.
Application service accounts are a particular type of account used in IT environments to execute automated processes, applications, or services. These privileged accounts usually have significant access to data about the company that has been stored in databases and applications. These accounts' passwords frequently get stored in plain text files that aren't encrypted, leaving them vulnerable to attack by hackers looking for ways into a company's network.
These accounts integrate with several apps and systems, allowing them to interact and obtain required resources, usually for running reports, getting database access, or making API calls. Since updating a domain service account's password necessitates the account's logout, this may cause the application to break if the password is not correctly synchronized.
Machine and human identities like applications, systems, third-party vendors, IT staff, system administrators, etc. that utilize privileged access to carry out business operations are called privileged identities. Privileged identities typically make use of a privileged account to perform various tasks on enterprise assets.
PAM works by holistically securing all privileged access vectors i.e., people, processes, and devices for reducing the risk of a data breach and misuse of privileges by providing control and complete visibility over privileged access.
Identity and access management is a security strategy aimed at managing identities and administering control over access permissions in an IT network. IAM ensures that the right person in your organization can access the right resource for the right purpose. The pillars of IAM include (but aren’t limited to):
Privileged access management falls under the umbrella of IAM. While IAM covers the canopy of identity management, PAM solution focuses on managing and governing access over business-critical resources and all privileged accounts associated with them. It encompasses tools to control elevated access and approvals for identities, thus decreasing the attack surface by allowing limited privileged access with specific levels of permissions. PAM solutions primarily cover the following aspects:
Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is a subset of PAM solution that targets the specific need of managing and controlling highly privileged access to resources. PIM solutions are limited to discovery and vaulting of privileged accounts, enforcing password policies and monitoring privileged access. It lacks session management capabilities and just-in-time privilege elevation controls that a PAM solution encompasses. PIM solutions often have lesser integrations (SIEM, Ticketing, etc.) with industry solutions than what a PAM solution offers.
Having a decentralized system to manage privileged accounts or managing them manually leads to varying management practices and inconsistent policies across an organization. When the organization scales, this inconsistency causes distress to the IT team. The increasing number of systems, assets, resources, and permissions makes them unmanageable, creates flaws in the manual process, and opens new avenues for attacks.
The 3 major risks due to unmanaged privileged accounts are:
Users with access to privileged accounts are directly linked to sensitive enterprise assets. These accounts pave the way to critical assets like servers, SSH keys, and important files. With an interconnected network, it is possible to crawl across systems and gain further elevated access. With a high level of access clearance, the compromise of even a single account lets hackers gain a foothold over the complete internal network.
Hackers who compromise a privileged account can then do multiple things:
Either way, without a system to manage privileged accounts - there is no way to gain alerts on suspicious activity, limit-monitor-or terminate privileged access, or stop threat actors from crawling into your IT network.
Credential theft remains the top attack vector favored by cybercriminals, causing more than 54% of all security incidents in 2022. Manually managing passwords, storing credentials on an excel sheet, or in an unsafe legacy password manager can all lead to attackers stealing your company passwords. Hackers can easily social engineer their way into a user's system and gain access to hardcoded passwords of various business accounts and applications.
These stolen passwords can either be held at ransom or bled to the internet, allowing anyone to dive deep into your internal network - to obtain sensitive information and access privileged accounts.
Privileged access management automates password management best practices, eliminates the need to remember complex passwords, and proactively stops credential theft. Thus, reducing the attack surface and majorly limiting the possibility of a security incident.
An unmanaged or orphaned privileged account left by a previous employee can be a major risk factor in any enterprise. If there are unknown privileged accounts within your network - bad actors, or any internal employee with malicious intent can utilize them to endanger your business. The employee leaving your organization can also log back into your critical systems with these accounts, and access information that is no longer required by them.
Eradicating unmanaged privileged accounts is key to stopping insider threats, privileged access management ensures that any employee leaving the organization is revoked of all his access permissions and helps transfer or deprovision privileged accounts they owned.
Access permissions granted to automated systems, programs, or processes instead of human users are called non-human privileged access. To carry out operations like data processing, system maintenance, or integration inside an IT environment, these automated entities need privileged access. For examples,
It is imperative for security that non-human privileged access be managed. To prevent misuse or unauthorized access that could jeopardize sensitive data or systems, strong controls, monitoring, and auditing are necessary.
Privileged Access Management is vital to protect privileged accounts and administer control over administrative access in your organization. It not only improves the overall security posture and also enhances operational efficiency across the enterprise. PAM is important for an organization:
The dynamic and fluctuating nature of cyber risks pushes organizations to keep their network secure on all fronts, and PAM helps battle the root factors that cause cyberattacks. With the threat landscape increasingly moving toward targeting privileged accounts, implementing PAM software has transitioned from an important security control to an absolute necessity.
Organizations face several challenges when it comes to provisioning privileged access and securing privileged accounts. Attackers exploit these loopholes to gain a foothold on machines, move laterally in the network and escalate privileges to attain their targets. Most security issues arise due to how we handle privileged accounts. The key challenges involved in privileged access management are as follows:
With a privileged access management solution in place, you will know where and when privileges are used in your organization. It will provide details on which user is exercising their privileges to access which network device and application. You can also get alerts upon occurrence of specific events that can aid with timely incident response.
Security coming at the cost of unrest amongst users is a thing of the past. Automating just in time access provisioning will reduce unnecessary downtime caused by manual access provisioning. In legacy access management systems, the user must raise a ticket and wait for the helpdesk technician to sort things out. This caused huge downtimes especially in bigger enterprises where the number of such tickets is sky high. Using workflows that reduce the helpdesk load and the turnaround time for each request helps reduce employee frustration.
PAM also provides a secure way for granting remote workers secure access without using VPNs. As corporates adopt remote work culture, granting users remote access to internal IT assets in a secure manner without causing unnecessary downtime and helpdesk overload is important. While a VPN grants access to remote users, there is little to no access control within the private network. All users get access to every asset within the organization once they connect to the VPN. PAM provides granular controls that can be used to grant end users limited access to specific assets within the network.
By enforcing the principle of least privilege, you can restrict internal users, and third-party vendors from gaining unfettered access to sensitive IT assets. PAM helps you track and monitor all privileged activities and provides complete control over privileged access. When a user is suspected of acting maliciously, all privileged access can be revoked instantly. In the event of a breach, the principle of least privilege ensures sensitive IT assets are not compromised.
Administrator accounts carry a lot of permissions and have much more reach across the network and can facilitate malware and ransomware propagation. Restricting and protecting access to such privileged accounts reduces the threat of malware-based attacks.
IT regulations mandate strict control over access to IT infrastructure. Ranging from password security to access control, various governing institutions have laid out their list of compliance requirements. With complete auditing and reporting capabilities, privileged access management solutions help demonstrate compliance to regulations like HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, NIST, ISO, GDPR and others.
ROI for security solutions directly relies on the reduction in attack surface. By eliminating the risks associated with privileged access, PAM reduces the attack surface from internal and external threats. An average data breach costs $5 Million. With proven methods to improve your security posture and novel ways to achieve it without impacting productivity, privileged access management solutions provide a phenomenal return on investment to organizations.
Discover the privileged accounts existing in your network and consolidate them into an encrypted vault for centralized management. A siloed approach to privileged account management reduces visibility and is detrimental to demonstrating compliance with regulations. Centralized credential management helps manage access to privileged credentials and enforce security best practices efficiently.
As a key security practice, you should only grant just enough access for users to fulfill their duties. In most cases, end users don’t need access to view or modify privileged credentials. If an end user needs access to an IT asset, you need to grant access to the asset without revealing the credentials. This is done using granular role-based access controls. You need to associate privileges with user roles and assign these roles to the respective users. You can granularly select and assign privileges to user roles.
Password security best practices include a variety of measures ranging from basic steps such as assigning long, strong, complex passwords to more modern steps like enforcing MFA. Modern computing capabilities make cracking passwords using brute force techniques very easy. A long, complex password will ensure that your privileged accounts are secure against such attacks. Enforcing MFA on sensitive accounts helps protect against credential-based attacks. Attacks like credential spraying and stuffing, enforcing MFA will help prevent unauthorized access to IT assets.
End user machines are often the weakest link in any network. These machines are used to access resources on the internet, access emails, download files, etc. These machines carry lot of vulnerabilities in them. If end user machines are allowed to connect to sensitive IT assets directly, the privileged identities get exposed to all kinds of threats. To protect privileged identities, restrict users from establishing a direct connection with them.
Route all your connections through a jump host to ensure no direct connections are established between end user machines and sensitive IT assets. You can achieve this by launching connections to assets from a PAM solution. Launch connections to IT assets through VPN less RDP, SSH, and SQL connections and ensure your internal IT assets are secure. As an additional security measure, you can enforce TLS encryption for all connections launched to internal assets.
One of the core principles of privileged access management is to eliminate all standing access to sensitive IT assets. When a user account with standing access to sensitive assets is compromised, the intruder will implicitly gain access to the asset. To prevent this, access to sensitive assets should always be ephemeral. Users should be able to access the asset only when absolutely required. The access should start and end within the specified time. This way of granting temporary privileged access is called just-in-time access.
Privileged access management solutions can help automate JIT-based access provisioning and offer methods to instantly revoke access if required. Once the access is revoked, it is advisable to reset the password of the asset.
Sensitive accounts are often used by internal users and external vendors and contractors. What the users do within a privileged session should be closely monitored and completely documented. All privileged activities should be recorded as audit trails to maintain a complete record. These records help maintain compliance with regulations. When remote connections are launched to sensitive assets, the entire session should be recorded and stored for analysis. Administrators should be able to shadow live sessions without the user’s knowledge. If any malicious activity is suspected, the administrator should terminate the session immediately.
Eliminating local administrator rights on endpoints will help mitigate almost 90% of all vulnerabilities that exist in Windows operating system. You can restrict employees from clicking on malicious links and downloading malware onto endpoints in your network by removing their local administrator privileges. Most employees can perform their job responsibilities working with standard user accounts.
To limit the threat surface of your organization, principles of zero-trust and zero-standing-privileges should be enforced. Zero-trust encourages organizations to adopt the policy of “Never trust, always verify” instead of the more traditional ‘Trust but verify”. One of the key action items in adopting Zero-trust is to enforce the principle of least privileges.
The principle of least privilege involves granting just enough access for the users to perform their duties. Granting just enough access at the right time eliminates productivity hurdles associated with eliminating local administrator privileges and making employees work with standard accounts.
Administrator accounts carry a lot of privileges with them and are often hot targets for attackers. Administrators make accessing sensitive information easy and are often involved in data breaches. To reduce the attack surface of the organization and protect sensitive information, the number of administrator accounts should be kept to a minimum.
One of the most important security best practices is to not put all your eggs in the same basket. To perform administrative tasks efficiently and securely, privileges should be split between different administrative users. Separation of privileges will help enforce separation of duties.
Such a structure will also help promote maker checker controls and ultimately improve the overall security posture of the organization. To strike a balance between limiting the number of administrators and separating duties, you should take into consideration the size and complexity of your organization, the number of administrative tasks at hand and the privileges involved.
Letting end user machines and privileged assets operate from the same network is not advisable. Human and non-human intruders can easily travel between devices in the network. To completely eliminate lateral movement of threat actors, privileged IT assets must be separated from the network in which end user machines operate. This is also addressed as network segmentation.
Network segmentation also helps curb malware and ransomware propagation from end user machines to privileged assets.
Cloud privileged access management (PAM) focuses on controlling and safeguarding privileged access to important systems and data in cloud environments. By enforcing consistent policies across all cloud platforms, this method improves security by giving centralized management over privileged accounts and helps reduce the risks associated with unmanaged and unmonitored privileged access. To ensure regulatory compliance, Cloud PAM solutions also provide automatic password management, real-time monitoring, and auditing capabilities. Additionally, they minimize the attack surface by using the principle of least privilege and increase operational efficiency by simplifying the handling of privileged credentials.
Privileged access is a special ability to perform tasks that are sensitive in nature. These include abilities such as shutting down critical systems, installing and managing device drivers, updating applications, configuring networks, and administration of servers and endpoints.
Privileged Access Management refers to a holistic process of protecting privileged accounts in an organization by restricting, controlling, and monitoring access to privileged credentials.
Passwords that can grant access to privileged assets in your organization are called privileged passwords. Access to these passwords should be restricted, controlled, and strictly monitored.
Privileged password management incorporates various measures such as periodic password rotation and enforcing complexity rules on passwords used to protect sensitive IT assets. Using these measures along with access controls to restrict and regulate access to these passwords can help organizations secure their senstive assets from internal and external threats.
Organizations struggle with restricting and regulating access to sensitive assets. PAM solutions have provisions that can help control, restrict, and monitor privileged accounts and access. Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions help discover and manage privileged accounts and provide complete visibility into the existence and access history of all privileged accounts in the organization.
Any account that provides users with special abilities beyond that of a standard user is called a privileged account. A few common examples are domain admin accounts, local administrator accounts, non-human privileged accounts used for process automation, service accounts, and break glass accounts.
Users who are allowed or authorized to perform tasks that a standard user is not allowed to do are called privileged users. These users often have permanent access to administrator accounts and sensitive files. It is highly advisable to eliminate permanent access to sensitive accounts and grant Just-in-Time based access to sensitive accounts.
Privileged accounts can be classified into two major groups. Human and non-human privileged accounts. Human accounts include Domain Admin accounts, Local user accounts, and Local Administrator accounts. Non-human privileged accounts include service accounts, application accounts, and accounts used by network devices.
Privileged credentials are used to grant elevated access to applications and devices in an network. They are often called “Keys to your Kingdom” as they could grant unrestricted access to your IT network. They are credentials often tasked to protect sensitive assets in a network. They are also widely referred to as secrets within DevOps environments.
Privileged Access Management solutions should be implemented with a deployment plan in place. The success criteria of a PAM implementation is restricting access and enforcing controls without impacting productivity of the organization.
Some of the top privileged access management best practices are
Organizations often use multiple applications that are developed in house and out sourced for running operations on a day to day basis. These applications communicate with eachother either programmatically or through human intervention and need to authenticate their identity frequently. Privileged credentials, SSH keys, and tokens are used to authenticate their identity. These credentials are called as Secrets.
Secrets management refers to the tools or strategies involved in securing and managing these secrets.
When two non human identities need to communicate with each other, they need to authenticate their identities. For this purpose, developers often write the credentials into the code in plain text. Credentials that are available in plain text are addressed as hardcoded credentials or embedded credentials.
Secrets are found all around an organization’s cyber space as hardcoded-credentials in dockers, as keys in various internally and externally sourced applications, vulnerability scanners, CI/CD pipelines etc.
Secrets are also used as a part of robotic process automation. Automated process offer a lot of advantages as they are extremely efficient when compared to processes carried out by humans. On the flipside, automated tasks are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. Cybercriminals understand this and repeatedly target secrets to gain unfettered access to assets. To protect the organization, it is important to protect the secrets and regulate access to them with the highest security measures available.
Standing privileges are access rights that are granted perpetually to a user or other machines. These privileges grant access to the underlying assets permanently and is extremely risky when the underlying assets are sensitive. External threats and malicious insiders can exploit the access and cause devastating damage.
To insulate organizations from these threats, it is recommended to grant ephemeral access (or) Just-In-Time access to IT assets.
Just-in-Time access is a concept of granting temporary time limited access to sensitive assets to a user at the right time. JIT access ensures that the concerned user has access to the privileged asset when required without having standing access to it. By adopting JIT based access provisioning, you can limit exposure to intruders and malicious insiders and improve your organization’s security posture.
Standing privileges grant permanent (or) perpetual access to IT assets. When users are granted standing privileges for performing certain tasks, they will be able to access the IT asset even after the task is completed. The access rights is completely unnecessary and could potentially be misused by the user.
Around 81% of all privilege misuse is carried out by an insider. These insiders are granted standing access which gets abused either due to negligence or malicious intent.
To reduce standing privileges, you need to adopt a holistic strategy that involves the following steps:
All these steps can be easily performed using a PAM solution. A PAM solution can discover all privileged credentials present in the IT network and consolidate them inside the centralized repository. It can help revoke access from users by performing a remote password reset on all the consolidated privileged identities.
Once access is revoked, you can use the PAM solution to grant JIT based access and minimize the impact on productivity.
A PAM system is also called a privileged access management system that helps control access to the most sensitive assets inside an organization. It is a subset of identity and access management which focusses on regulating access to all assets inside an organization.
A privileged access management tool is software that helps control and monitor privileged access (level of access that is beyond any standard user) in an organization. These tools are made with capabilities that let you grant restricted, temporary access to sensitive assets within the organization.
Admin privileges are permissions that generally allow users to install and modify applications on devices. These privileges are beyond standard users' levels and are usually granted to IT administrators ephemerally.
The principle of least privilege is based on the zero-trust concept that instructs us to grant the minimal level of access only when absolutely required. The principle of least privilege is a core aspect of privileged access management solutions and is enforced by granting just-in-time, just-enough access to sensitive assets in the organization.
Privileged access management tools help control and regulate access to sensitive assets. Privileged access management is considered a subset of identity and access management which focuses on controlling access to IT infrastructure.
Privileged access governance encompasses provisioning and deprovisioning access to sensitive IT assets, sharing access with just-enough permissions to fulfill their responsibilities, ensuring access to assets are ephemeral and properly tracked. It provides holistic visibility over access to sensitive assets and ensures access is granted only to people who need it, only when they need it.
When organizations are not able to administer a privileged access management solution by themselves, they often outsource the task to contractors and service providers. These service providers can offer privileged access management as a service to their customers. PAM as a Service can be offered with different administrative configurations. The service providers can simply host the solution while the organization manages access completely or the service providers can cover end-to-end privileged access management for their customers.
Privileged access workstations (PAW) are special devices that are designated to carry out all tasks that require administrator rights such as managing the Active Directory, databases, servers, applications, and important assets.
These workstations usually have hardened security measures that protect them from internet threats and other internal and external attack vectors.
Privileged account and session management is a sub-domain of privileged access management that focusses on protecting identities by storing them inside an encrypted vault and granting restricted access to users only when required. They also have comprehensive context-based access controls that govern remote access by allowing admins to record, monitor, and track remote sessions in the network.
The set of controls used to monitor, control, and track what the users with highest access privileges in the organization is called privileged user management. These controls are commonly found in privileged access management solutions.
Service accounts are domain accounts whose credentials are used to run services, processes and are often cached locally. Subjecting service accounts to password security practices like periodic password resets can cause these dependent services and processes to come to a grinding halt. Service account governance helps manage these sensitive accounts by maintaining a comprehensive list of dependencies of each service account. It also makes enforcing password security practices viable by ensuring that any change to the credentials is propagated to the dependencies.
Zero standing privileges is a concept where no user, regardless of their position or requirement, is granted permanent access to privileges. The mechanism dictates users to request elevated access to business-critical resources whenever required. This protects the organization from internal and external threats.
Third parties such as vendors and contractors regularly work with organizations to roll out new solutions and maintain existing solutions. The nature of their work requires them to have access to some of the most sensitive devices in the organization. Controlling, monitoring, and tracking their access is important for the organization’s security. Third-party access management is a sub-domain of privileged access management that focusses exclusively on securing third-party access to internal systems.
Remote privileged access management (RPAM) is not a separate category of privileged access management solution but more of a use case that focuses on how access is monitored, managed, and controlled, particularly for privileged users accessing systems remotely. RPAM comes in handy to establish secure, remote connections with privileged devices within OT environments, de-militarized zones, and other air-gapped environments.