How to Create an End-to-End Privileged Access Management Lifecycle – Source: heimdalsecurity.com

Key takeaways:

• Why privileged access management requires a continuous approach;
• The common pitfalls of poor privileged access management;
• How to create an effective, end-to-end privileged access management lifecycle.

Privileged access management (PAM) is an essential tool of any modern cybersecurity strategy. But getting it right isn’t always straightforward. For it to work, you need to construct an end-to-end PAM lifecycle. In this blog, we explain how that works.

The Challenge of Effective Privileged Access Management

Too often, security teams lack visibility over the privileged accounts they have. This makes it uniquely difficult to create effective policies – because you don’t know where the back doors and entry points are. Solving that problem is the key to getting PAM right.

Bogdan Dolohan, Head of Support and IT, Heimdal®

Privileged access management involves controlling access to the most sensitive information and assets in your IT environment, in order to more effectively protect them. This requires a policy of ‘least privilege‘ – where permissions are assigned on a strict ‘need to have’ basis.

But here’s the challenge: today’s IT environments are complex. They could include everything from traditional servers to virtual machines, RPA workflows, SaaS apps, IoT devices… the list goes on and on. The days of all your IT assets being wired up to a physical network are over.

This makes visibility a real challenge because IT teams simply don’t know what they don’t know. Here are a few examples of the challenges this can cause for today’s organizations:

1. Hidden privileged accounts

Let’s pretend your HR team has recently set up an RPA workflow to manage contracts and organize payroll information. That might seem fairly innocuous. But the reality is these workflows need access to sensitive employee data in the same way the HR team would.

The RPA workflow, therefore, requires a privileged identity of its own. Such identities, known as ‘service accounts’, are difficult to identify and track – making them a key entry point for threat actors. Here, the organization can be breached via such accounts if they aren’t properly accounted for and protected.

2. Privilege creep

Another key challenge is privilege creep, as permissions tend to expand over time. Employees might change roles without anybody revoking permissions they no longer need. Others might take on permissions for temporary projects or tasks that quickly become permanent. Other privileged users might leave the company and retain access. And elevated permissions might be granted to people who don’t strictly need them because it’s quicker and easier than the established process.

To combat privilege creep, it’s important to audit regularly and reduce any unnecessary privileges in the organization.

3. Missing the basics

Let’s pretend your CFO, Jane, is on a train, heading to a busy conference. Naturally, she’s hard at work on the journey. But she hasn’t noticed that the person sitting next to her is suspiciously interested in the bookkeeping spreadsheets she’s working on.

Jane also hasn’t clocked that her name and job title are clearly displayed on a sticker on the front of the laptop and that a surprising amount of sensitive information can be quite easily inferred from the very loud phone argument she had with the CHRO half an hour before.

Long story short: PAM isn’t just about technology. It’s often easy to get lost in metrics, workflows, and scanning tools and miss the most obvious entry points.

In each of these examples, the definition of privileged access was too narrow. The organizations didn’t understand the full scope of entry points that hackers could use and focused their efforts in the wrong place. At the same time, they lacked an ongoing culture of least privilege, leading to weak points that machines can struggle to detect.

So what’s the solution? That’s where the PAM lifecycle comes in. Done well, it should combine people, processes, and technology to achieve a holistic and continuous approach to elevated access.

The goal? Ensuring the smallest possible risk landscape, at all times.

Step by Step: The Full Privileged Access Management Lifecycle

The organizations that do PAM well don’t think of it as a ‘job to be done’. It’s a mindset and a continuous process of auditing, removing privileges, and applying new defenses. Like anything in cybersecurity, the danger comes when you think the job’s complete.

Bogdan Dolohan, Head of Support and IT, Heimdal®

While there’s no single defined framework for managing privileged access, there are a series of broadly accepted best practices and principles. The goal here is to shift privileged access management from being a ‘one and done’ task to being a more continuous and holistic approach. It’s as much about adopting the right mindset as it is about technology and processes.

But crucially, no effective PAM strategy can be complete in 2024 without the right tools. Specialist privileged access management software is realistically the only way to achieve much of the advice we provide below. No strategy should start and end with technology – but at the same time, it can’t really be complete without it. Combined with the right processes, the PAM software should give you an effective toolkit to manage the issues we described in the last section. This includes shadow privileges, scope creep, and lack of visibility over the full landscape of identities to protect.

Here are the basic steps that an effective PAM lifecycle needs to follow:

1. Identify accounts

The best place to start is to run a discovery scan of all existing privileged accounts. Realistically, this isn’t possible without a modern privileged access management solution.

Generally, this will involve a PAM audit using your specialist privileged access management system. This should automatically identify privileged identities, including those that you might not know about or are no longer used. The most up-to-date PAM tools will be able to scan cloud assets, RPA workflows, virtual machines, and other relevant IT systems to ensure you’re accounting for the full scope of individual and service accounts requiring access.

2. Audit using least privilege

Now the scan is complete, you should apply least privilege and reduce any unnecessary access across the organization – including both user and service accounts. By its nature, this is a qualitative process and requires you understanding where sensitive data lies and who needs access to it.

First, limit elevated permissions so that they’re only available to a small number of people who actually need them. Then, remove standing privileges, administrative access rights on end-user devices, and default all users to standard privileges. It’s also helpful here to separate privileges between different people to avoid one account acquiring too much risk.

3. Set up continuous processes and monitoring

It’s also important to make sure that you’re regularly repeating the least privilege audit to reduce any unnecessary privilege creep. The more often you do this, the safer you’ll be.

It can also be helpful to maintain an inventory of privileges, so you can easily track, compare, and check the full scope of privileged credentials in the organization over time.

But by far the best way to achieve this is to adopt a tool that can constantly monitor behavioral signals associated with privileged accounts. They can detect anomalies in location, login time, devices, and the specific assets a privileged account is accessing. Ideally, these tools should be able to grant or deny just-in-time access to accounts, on a case-by-case basis. This means suspicious activity can still be locked down, even if involves accounts that do require elevated permissions.

This can help reduce expanding privileges and inhibit the progress of hackers after they’ve accessed the IT environment.

4. Establish robust protections

It’s also important to implement robust modern policies and protections to ensure individual accounts are as difficult as possible for hackers to access and move between. This involves:

• Requiring relevant accounts to have complex privileged account passwords that are changed regularly
• Combining traditional passwords with more modern tools like multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometrics, single-sign on, digital tokens, and more
• Segmenting the systems and networks in your environment, including servers, databases, instances, WiFi systems, and more. This should limit lateral movement after a successful attack
• Use modern tools to adopt dynamic, context-based access – known as privileged session management. This should ensure suspicious activity can be stopped, even when privileged accounts are targeted

5. Ongoing training and monitoring

Effective privileged access security can’t just be about monitoring the right metrics and revoking access regularly. As we discovered earlier, privileged accounts can be compromised in several ways that only effective training can combat. This includes:

• Information being leaked via computer screen or other physical media;
• End users giving away access details inadvertently through (e.g. phishing scams);
• Poor password hygiene;
• Users elevating each other’s permissions or using unmonitored IT tools.

The list goes on. Of course, you want to proactively avoid these issues wherever possible. Restricting who can elevate permissions and enforcing strong password requirements will obviously make a huge difference here. But no policy or technology can entirely remove end-user risk. Regular mandatory training on all these issues and challenges is therefore vital.

Best Practices for an Effective PAM Lifecycle

To sum up the advice of the last section, here is a list of general best practices for effective privileged access management:

• Regularly audit privileged accounts with specialist tools that can identify both privileged user and service accounts;
• Implement least privilege and regularly revoke unnecessary access;
• Regularly rotate passwords and enforce strict password standards;
• Combine passwords with modern security tools like multi-factor authentication, single-sign on, password managers, and more;
• Adopt real-time monitoring and auditing to provide access on a case-by-case basis, rather than having individual identities with standing credentials;
• Distribute privileges among different identities to reduce their individual risk;
• Train and educate users on the methods and risks involved in effective PAM.

This list isn’t exhaustive as the specific policies, technologies, and assets to be protected will differ from organization to organization. But if you’re wondering where to start, these tips will form the basis for an effective strategy.

Achieve Robust Privileged Access Management with Heimdal®

As we’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog, effective privileged access management is either very difficult or next to impossible without the right tools. Here’s how Heimdal® can help:

• Automatically de-escalate user rights upon threat detection – the only tool on the market to do so;
• Realtime threat monitoring with an efficient approval/denial flow;
• User rights that adapt based on realtime signals;
• Zero-trust principles and least privileged policies built in by design;
• Audit ready-graphics for easy overview and responsive decision-making.

Want to find out more? Try Heimdal® today.

FAQs

What is a privileged access management lifecycle?

A privileged access management lifecycle refers to a culture and process of least privilege at every level of the organization. It involves identifying, controlling, and auditing privileged accounts. This ensures that high-level access is only granted when necessary and is strictly regulated and monitored to prevent unauthorized or malicious activities.

What are the steps of a privileged access management lifecycle?

There’s no single defined framework for an effective PAM lifecycle. But generally, successful companies will follow a similar process:

• Identify all accounts
• Audit using least privilege
• Set up continuous processes and monitoring
• Implement robust modern protections
• Adopt ongoing training and monitoring

What are some best practices for effective privileged account management?

Here are some general PAM best practices:

• Regularly audit privileged accounts
• Implement least privilege
• Regularly rotate passwords
• Use tools like multi-factor authentication, single-sign on, and password managers.
• Adopt realtime monitoring and auditing
• Train and educate users

Implementing these policies will help you achieve a thorough PAM lifecycle.

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