Privileged Accounts 101: Everything You Need to Know

Privileged accounts are one of the most common entry points for hackers. The profusion of accounts in an organization and the difficulty of managing them creates a unique target for malicious actors. Securing these accounts, therefore, is a key tenent of an effective privileged access management strategy.

To stay safe, it’s important to understand what accounts exist and how they’re targeted. Here’s what you need to know.

What are Privileged Accounts?

If you work in marketing, you should be able to make changes to articles on the website. But you shouldn’t go into development code or finance databases. So privileged access management is all about identifying you as a user and your role – and setting up rules for what you should be able to see and engage with in the company based on it.

Mikkel Pederson, Head of Global Sales Enablement, Heimdal®

Privileged accounts are simple to understand but can be incredibly challenging to manage. Effectively, they are any users or services that require access to sensitive data or assets in order to do their job or complete a function. These accounts are key targets for hackers, as elevated privileges are generally needed to execute a vulnerability.

In order to stay safe, it’s important to exercise ‘least privilege’ at every level – which essentially means removing unnecessary access permissions wherever possible. But managing these privileged accounts can be a real challenge for organizations. Often, the hard part is simply knowing which accounts exist in the first place. At the same time, ‘privilege creep’ is a significant issue. This refers to the common experience of access permissions gradually expanding over time. This can lead to an ever-expanding attack surface, which becomes increasingly risky.

To reduce this attack surface, we first need to understand the different types of user accounts that exist and how they can be used to aid an effective attack.

Privileged User Accounts

The first category of privileged accounts is perhaps the easiest to understand, since these belong to named employees in the organization. There are several different user accounts available, each with varying levels of access and oversight.

These accounts vary in the specific threats they pose and the way hackers use them to aid a successful attack – so it’s important to be aware of the dangers and enforce least privilege at all levels.

Domain Level Administrator Accounts

Domain level administrators are the highest level of administrative account that’s available, generally offering unrestricted access to and rights within the entire IT infrastructure. These are generally called ‘Admin’ in Windows and ‘Root’ accounts in Unix/ Linux environments.

Key vulnerability: Organizations generally restrict domain admin accounts to very few users, with significant extra security controls. Nonetheless, if hackers do manage to infiltrate one of these accounts, the damage they can do to sensitive systems is virtually unimpeded.

Superuser Accounts

The next level down from domain level accounts, superuser accounts have unrestricted access and control over a single system. Often, this includes the ability to modify system files, install software, and make changes within that system. Generally, this access is required for local system maintenance and administration.

Key vulnerability: Though less common than other accounts on this list, these are another important target. If hackers gain access, they can do unrestricted harm to the system or network they’re targeting.

Local Administrator Accounts

Local administrators have access to privileged rights over their own local devices. Unlike others on this list, this doesn’t give them authority over networks, systems, or domains. Instead, they have the ability to make changes to their own device operating system, such as installing apps, making file changes, and adjusting active directory details.

Key vulnerability: Despite their relatively limited privileges, these still pose a significant risk, often due to their ubiquity. Local privileges are often given to avoid normal approval processes for software installation and OS changes. They are a key target as hackers try and pass laterally through an IT environment and elevate their own privileges.

Emergency Accounts

Also known as ‘break glass’ accounts, these are reserved for emergencies like cyber attacks or to quickly restore critical systems after an outage. Generally, these accounts are disabled until they are needed and access is restricted. When access is given, however, these users often have a lot of privilege, albeit temporarily.

Key vulnerability: By their nature, these accounts are designed to bypass authentication and monitoring processes to allow quick response in a crisis.

In the worst instance, hackers might target these accounts in an attempt to get superuser or domain level privileges that otherwise would be much more difficult to gain. Even if they don’t, the use of emergency accounts during an attack might make a post-breach analysis more difficult, depending on the specific auditing and monitoring processes they’re designed to circumvent.

Privileged Business Users

Unlike the other accounts so far, privileged business users don’t have admin rights over any IT or infrastructure. Instead, they require access to sensitive information, usually personal data of customers or employees.

This could be marketing or sales teams needing access to CRM data or HR teams and managers viewing employee salary data.

Key vulnerability: These accounts are popular entry points for hackers. It’s easy for privileged business users to quickly expand across an organization, creating multiple entry points. Often the ability to grant admin rights is devolved as well as the rights themselves. These users are a key contributor to privilege creep.

At the same time, these end users aren’t IT-specific employees, which often means they’re easier to target through low-level phishing scams and brute-force password guessing tactics.

Privileged Service Accounts

It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking user accounts are the only show in town when it comes to privileged access management. Increasingly, this is less and less the case, as privileged access is now required for a whole range of machine identities. This could include, for example, IoT devices, RPA processes, or system configurations.

Across all of these accounts, the key vulnerability is the same: IT teams often don’t have oversight over what accounts exist and what permissions they hold. This makes it difficult to enforce least privilege and thus reduce the overall attack surface.

As well as this, the lack of visibility makes it difficult for IT teams to implement effective password rotation policies. These accounts also often rely on plain text credentials being hard-coded into the relevant service or application’s source code. Developers often implement this to ease friction in the machine-to-machine processes. But it creates a significant vulnerability if hackers get access to this source code, and by association, the credentials.

Application Account

These provide applications access to other apps, databases, or running scripts. That application might require access to sensitive assets in order to complete automated tasks, updates, deploy software, and configure changes.

Service Accounts

Service accounts interact specifically with the operating system in an IT environment. These accounts are often referred to as init or inetd accounts in Unix and Linux environments. System accounts are another, similar example – generally created by operating systems during installation.

Examples of relevant processes could include installing applications, updates, and patches, as well as running database backups, and cleaning up log files.

Active Directory/ Domain Service Accounts

These also help machine identities interact with the operating system. They might be used to access databases, APIs, or other sensitive endpoints – all of which will require changes to the operating system. Often, these pose a significant security risk as changing the password can lead to complications with these accounts, so organizations rarely implement effective password rotation here. Hard-coded credentials, another security risk, are often used as a shortcut.

Best Practices for Maintaining Least Privilege With Privileged User Accounts

Effective PAM policies can be a bit like cleaning your house every week. We know we have to do it, but it’s easy to postpone or forget. In business, finding the time to run these least privilege processes is a real challenge. That’s why knowing what to do and having the process is only half the story. You also need to find a way to make it as automated as possible, so you can be sure it’ll be executed.

Mikkel Pederson, Head of Global Sales Enablement, Heimdal®

Now we’ve got an idea of the main privileged accounts, we can discuss some best practices for how to manage them. Here are the main policies you should implement to enforce least privilege and eliminate the biggest risks associated with these accounts:

Remove Standing Privileges Wherever Possible

Standing privileges exist when a single account (user or service) has ‘always on’ access. These pose a significant security risk – if they’re hacked, there’s virtually nothing stopping the attacker. Naturally, these are particularly dangerous on domain level and superuser accounts.

Instead, ‘conditional’ or ‘just-in-time’ permissions should be employed so that access can be elevated for specific tasks, and revoked again once the task can reasonably be expected to be complete.

Conduct regular least privilege audits

With the most up-to-date cloud PAM security tools, it’s possible to automatically identify all the privileged user and service accounts that exist across an organization. Realistically, this is the only effective way to map out the entire scope of privileged accounts that exist.

Once you’ve done this, you should enforce least privilege by removing all unnecessary privileged user and service accounts. Then, repeat regularly to avoid the risk of privilege creep gradually expanding your attack surface over time.

Eliminate Superuser Accounts and Distribute Privileges

Where possible, you should eliminate superuser and domain level privileged accounts. The unimpeded access they have over a network or system makes them a uniquely prized target for hackers. Instead, these elevated privileges should be split up and distributed between different accounts to avoid one having too much control.

Enable MFA for All Privileged Accounts

It’s also important to increase security protections as much as possible on privileged accounts. The more barriers you create for hackers to pass through, the less successful they are likely to be. There are many ways to do this, but enabling multi-factor authentication for all privileged accounts is perhaps the most important.

It’s vital to be aware that multi-factor authentication isn’t a silver bullet. Sim swap scams, for instance, have historically been used to gain access to an employee’s phone. But with the right technology, MFA is an easy protection to put in place and a difficult one for hackers to get around. This makes it one of the most important steps you can take to keep your IT environment safe.

Remove Hard-Coded Credentials

Hard-coded credentials also create a key vulnerability and are particularly common in service accounts. If plain text passwords can be viewed from source code, it’s significantly easier for hackers to gain access.

Again, it’s important to take advantage of the most recent cloud PAM solutions, which can automatically identify these vulnerabilities. Then, you should replace them with an alternative, such as a secure password vault, or digital token-based authentication.

Building a Least Privilege Mindset With Heimdal®

The challenge with modern, cloud-based IT environments largely comes down to complexity and scale. There are simply too many endpoints across too diverse a range of systems for IT teams to manually monitor and govern.

That’s why it’s so important to make sure you’re getting access to modern, cloud-based PAM solutions like Heimdal®’s Privileged Access Management tool – so you can effectively implement the strongest possible defense.

With our solution, you will get a tool that is equiped with:

• Total Privilege Management: This function lets you define and manage role-based access control and delegation policies with ease.
• Just-in-Time Secured Privilege Access: Allows your admins to grant temporary enhanced privileged access to users only when necessary.
• Audit and Reporting: Lets you generate comprehensive reports, monitor privileged access/session activities, and easily prove adherence to local or global regulatory standards.

and many more functions that will make managing privileged access in your company as easy and safe as it can get!

FAQs

What is a privileged account?

A privileged account is any user or service with elevated permissions, providing access to critical systems and sensitive data. These accounts pose higher security risks, requiring strict privileged account management policies and monitoring to prevent unauthorized access and potential breaches.

What are the main types of privileged accounts?

Privileged user accounts include a domain level administrator account, superuser accounts, local admin accounts, emergency accounts, and privileged business users. Privileged service accounts include application accounts, service accounts, and active directory/domain service accounts.

What’s the difference between privileged user and service accounts?

Privileged user accounts belong to human users with administrative rights, allowing them significant control over systems. Service accounts, on the other hand, are created for automated processes and applications, often with specific privileges. Both require precise management to ensure security and prevent unauthorized access in cybersecurity.

Cristian Neagu

CONTENT EDITOR

Cristian is a Content Editor & Creator at Heimdal®, where he developed a deep understanding of the digital threat landscape. His style resonates with both technical and non-technical readers, proof being in his skill of communicating cybersecurity norms effectively, in an easy-to-understand manner.