Due to the distinct security blindspots associated with PAM solutions, protecting privileged accounts has become a daunting task for most organizations. These blind spots include lengthy deployment cycles and manual account discovery delays in identifying privileged accounts. At the same time, gaps in enforcing least privilege access and preventing admins from bypassing security controls leave organizations vulnerable to compromise.
Simply managing privileged accounts is not sufficient—without implementing concrete security controls for these accounts, the sheer volume of access pathways, users, and entitlements can quickly spiral out of control. In order to truly protect which users should be granted access to the organization’s crown jewels, we must rethink how privileged access is secured to ensure that it does not become a gateway to attackers.
In this post, we will show the different capabilities you can gain from Silverfort’s newly launched Privileged Access Security (PAS) module. We will explain how Silverfort enables you to secure your privileged accounts easily through automated discovery and classification, fencing, and enforcing least privilege and Just-In-Time (JIT) access policies for all your privileged users.
The Privileged Access Blind Spots 101
The traditional approach to managing privileged accounts with PAM solutions focuses on controlling and monitoring who has access, but it does not take into account the significant limitations that leave these accounts exposed. The limitations of PAM solutions create blind spots in an organization’s identity security posture, making it easier for attackers to navigate across an organization’s environment without being noticed.
What are the limitations of traditional PAM solutions that organizations need to overcome?
- Slow and Complex Onboarding: According to Osterman Research, only 10% of organizations successfully complete their PAM projects, often due to the time and resources required to onboard all systems and accounts. This incomplete coverage leaves many privileged accounts unmanaged and vulnerable to compromise, creating gaps attackers can easily target.
- Discovery Gaps: Traditional PAM tools struggle to identify all privileged accounts, users, and the systems they access. These unknown or unmonitored accounts become hidden entry points for attackers, who exploit them to escalate privileges and move laterally across environments.
- Bypassing PAM: Administrators often get around PAM by directly checking out credentials or accessing servers without using PAM workflows. This undermines the protections PAM provides, leaving a trail of unmonitored activity that attackers can replicate or exploit to avoid detection.
- Privileged Access Abuse: Misuse of privileged accounts, such as using elevated access for non-critical tasks, expands the attack surface. When these accounts are overused or used improperly, it increases the risk of compromise and makes it harder to detect malicious activity amid legitimate actions.
These blind spots weaken traditional PAM solutions, making it easier for attackers to bypass controls and compromise critical systems. Organizations need to deploy a more proactive approach that goes beyond managing their privileged accounts and instead emphasizes security above all.
Silverfort’s Privileged Access Security (PAS)
Silverfort offers a new approach to overcoming the limitations of traditional PAM solutions through its unique architecture, which integrates directly with Active Directory.
Silverfort automatically discovers and classifies all privileged accounts based on user activity. This enables organizations to gain comprehensive visibility into all privileged accounts, cross-tier authentications, and access requests to identify whether regular accounts are being used with privileged intent.
With Silverfort’s PAS, organizations can implement Just-in-Time (JIT) access policies to ensure that privileged accounts only receive the necessary permissions when needed and for a limited duration. Implementing these controls allows organizations to improve their security posture while achieving zero standing privileges at scale.
Silverfort uses a three-step approach to secure privileged accounts:
- Discover and classify all your privileged accounts.
- Fence privileged accounts to their intended purpose.
- Enforce frictionless Just-in-Time (JIT) access policies at scale.
Automated Discovery and Classification
The first step to properly securing all privileged accounts is understanding exactly who your privileged users are and what they are accessing. Here are several key questions to consider:
- What privileged accounts do you have?
- How many privileged accounts do you have?
- Which assets or systems are these accounts accessing?
These questions are answered when you deploy Silverfort’s PAS. The discovery and classification step is initiated when an organization connects its domain controllers to Silverfort. This allows Silverfort to automatically discover, identify, and classify all privileged accounts based on the actual user activity and authentications. Organizations gain comprehensive visibility into all privileged accounts and their access requests to critical resources to identify whether these accounts are being used with privileged intent.
Silverfort also classifies different privileged user tiers based on their actual activity and helps organizations prioritize and implement tailored security controls for each tier. By monitoring account behavior, Silverfort detects and alerts on risky cross-tier access attempts, enabling organizations to proactively address privilege escalation threats.
Fence Privileged Accounts to Their Intended Purpose
Once full visibility and insight into all privileged accounts is achieved, the next phase is to configure a virtual fence for these accounts to ensure they are used for their intended purposes.
Silverfort’s fencing capabilities provide organizations with strong security control over privileged accounts by restricting their access to the specific resources that require high privileges, while any unnecessary or unauthorized access to other resources is automatically blocked.
To further reduce risk, Silverfort limits the use of privileged accounts to predefined sources, destinations and protocols, thereby reducing the possibility of misuse and lateral movement. By detecting and preventing privilege escalation and cross-tier access attempts, Silverfort ensures strict role segmentation is applied and protects against unauthorized activities.
What sets Silverfort apart is its ability to automatically recommend tailored least privilege policies based on real account usage patterns. These policies specify exactly where and how privileged accounts should be used, and the approved access rules for each account. This automation not only simplifies implementation but also significantly reduces the attack surface, ensuring privileged accounts are only used within their intended parameters.
Seamless Just-In-Time Access
Configuring and applying time-sensitive Just-In-Time access policies is the final step in completely securing all your privileged users.
Using Silverfort’s JIT capabilities, organizations can render accounts completely unusable until access is explicitly required. This approach significantly reduces the attack surface and ensures that privileged accounts remain secure when not actively in use. Through the removal of unnecessary standing privileges, Silverfort minimizes overexposure and enforces strict access controls.
JIT policies are easy to create in the Silverfort console under the PAS screen, where you can simply design frictionless access policies for each user and assign the duration of their access. Admins may select the type of authentication and, if MFA is selected, which MFA token needs to be activated.
Implementing JIT policies with Silverfort reduces the need for outdated and complex security controls, such as password rotation and vaulting, which are often time-consuming and difficult to implement. As a result, access rights are granted dynamically and only when necessary, aligning security with efficiency.
Learn More About Silverfort’s Privileged Access Security
With Silverfort’s newly launched Privileged Access Security (PAS) module, all privileged users are secured with real-time security controls. By automating the discovery and classification of privileged accounts, enforcing least privilege principles and enabling Just-In-Time (JIT) access policies, Silverfort empowers you to secure privileged access with unprecedented ease and efficiency.
Looking to learn how you can change the way you secure privileged access? Check out our on-demand PAS webinar or reach out to one of our experts here.