Shortcuts
- Who are privileged users and why are they the No. 1 target for attackers?
- What doesn’t show up in the standard system logs?
- How do you prove who made the critical change?
- How to control the sessions of employees outside the office?
- How to securely manage third-party access?
- Why are shared passwords an open gateway for attackers?
- What is the risk of unlimited time allowances?
- Why is the minimum entitlement rule so difficult to implement?
- How to meet audit and regulatory requirements (RODO, NIS2)?
- What an effective security strategy looks like: Centralization and auditability
- How does nFlo support organizations in protecting privileged access?
Who are privileged users and why are they the No. 1 target for attackers?
In any IT infrastructure, there are accounts with elevated privileges. They belong to system administrators, DevOps engineers, third-party implementers or even automated applications. These users, known as privileged users, have access to the organization’s critical resources: servers, databases, network devices and business applications. They can install software, modify configurations, manage data and other users’ accounts.
It is this wide range of privileges that makes privileged accounts the number one target for cybercriminals. Taking over a single such account gives an attacker almost unlimited possibilities to operate inside a company’s network. At the same time, even without the involvement of external factors, a misconfiguration introduced by an authorized but acting unattended administrator can lead to a catastrophic failure.
The problem is not in the existence of such accounts - they are essential to the functioning of any complex infrastructure. The real challenge lies in gaining full control and visibility of their activities. The lack of a central system to manage, monitor and audit privileged sessions creates a huge security gap.
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What doesn’t show up in the standard system logs?
One fundamental problem is the limited value of standard system logs in the context of incident analysis. Text logs, generated by servers or applications, often only record the fact that a user logged in, logged out or performed a single high-level operation. They rarely provide a complete picture of the actions performed by an administrator during an entire session.
Imagine a log that reports that the user admin ran the script update.sh. What exactly does this mean? What commands did this script contain? What parameters were passed to it and what messages did it return during execution? The standard log will not answer these questions. It only gives us residual information, which is insufficient for precise reconstruction of events.
What’s more, a sophisticated attacker or rogue employee can easily modify or completely delete system logs to erase traces of their activities. Relying on evidence that can be manipulated is unacceptable from a security and audit perspective. An organization must strive to have incontrovertible evidence.
How do you prove who made the critical change?
The problem of lack of visibility directly leads to another challenge: lack of clear accountability. In many IT environments, it is still common practice to share accounts with the highest privileges, such as root on Linux systems or administrator on Windows systems. When such an account is used by ten different engineers, assigning authorship of a particular change becomes impossible.
In the event of a security failure or incident, the team is faced with the question: who exactly made the change that led to the problem? Without clearly identifying the person, the root cause analysis process turns into a lengthy and often fruitless investigation. Lack of accountability leads to repetition of the same mistakes and makes it difficult to enforce internal security policies.
This problem escalates during audits. Auditors require a clear link between each operation and a specific individual. The inability to clearly identify the operator of a privileged account is a serious deficiency and can lead to a negative assessment of regulatory compliance.
How to control the sessions of employees outside the office?
Remote and hybrid working have become standard, which has spawned new security challenges. Providing administrators and engineers with secure access to key company resources from anywhere in the world is an operational necessity. However, traditional solutions such as VPNs often prove insufficient in the context of privileged access.
A standard VPN connection creates a tunnel to the internal corporate network, but does not provide granular control over what an employee does after gaining access. An administrator’s session connecting from home is often a “black box” for the security department. There is no central point where these sessions can be monitored in real time, analyzing the commands being executed or terminating them immediately if necessary.
An additional risk is the condition of the workstation from which the employee makes the connection. Is his home computer properly secured? Is it not infected with malware that can use the VPN tunnel to infiltrate the corporate network? This problem requires a solution that isolates the privileged session from the end device.
How to securely manage third-party access?
Almost every organization works with third-party software vendors, implementation companies or service technicians who need privileged access to the infrastructure to do their jobs. Managing this access is one of the biggest and most underestimated security challenges.
Sharing login credentials for privileged accounts with third-party companies or opening wide access for them via VPN is extremely risky. You lose control over who actually uses the credentials provided and what operations they perform. Once the project is completed, these credentials are often not revoked, leaving an open door that no one remembers anymore.
Secure management of third-party access requires the implementation of the zero-trust principle. Each partner should be given access only to those systems that he absolutely needs, for a strictly limited period of time. Each of his sessions should be fully monitored and logged, and credentials should never be shared openly with him.
Why are shared passwords an open gateway for attackers?
Privileged account passwords are the most valuable loot for cybercriminals. Unfortunately, they are still managed in a way that blatantly violates basic principles of digital hygiene. Using the same static passwords by multiple administrators and storing them in unsecured Excel files or notes is a simple path to disaster.
Password sharing raises several fundamental problems. First, it significantly increases the risk of leakage - all it takes is for one employee to fall victim to phishing, and the attacker gains access to credentials used throughout the infrastructure. Second, it makes it impossible to enforce accountability, as mentioned earlier.
Third, the process of password lifecycle management becomes an operational nightmare. Regular password rotation is one of the basic security requirements. Manually changing passwords on dozens or hundreds of servers and devices and securely communicating them to all authorized individuals is a process so cumbersome that it is overlooked in practice.
What is the risk of unlimited time allowances?
Many organizations still operate under the outdated “trust and forget” model. An administrator, once verified, is given permanent and often very broad access to many systems. Such standing privileges, active 24/7, create a huge and unnecessary attack surface. Even if an administrator only needs access to a server for two hours a month, his account remains fully privileged at all times.
Such a model is extremely risky. If an account is compromised, the attacker has an unlimited window of time to act. He can stay hidden for weeks, conducting reconnaissance and preparing for the final strike, and the compromised account will be his permanent pass to key systems.
The modern approach to security requires a move away from this model in favor of “Just-in-Time” (JIT) access. Privileged access should be granted dynamically, only on demand, for a predetermined minimum amount of time necessary to perform a specific task. After that time, privileges are automatically revoked.
Why is the minimum entitlement rule so difficult to implement?
The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is the concept that each user or system should have only those privileges that are absolutely necessary to perform its tasks. Although it is one of the cornerstones of cyber security, its implementation in practice is extremely difficult.
In complex IT environments, precisely defining a minimum set of permissions for each administrator and each application is a complex and time-consuming task. As a result, due to lack of time or knowledge, administrators are often granted redundant privileges “just in case,” leading to a situation where the engineer responsible for databases has full domain administrator rights.
This problem is exacerbated by the lack of tools to granularly control permissions. Managing hundreds of individual accounts and policies on dozens of different systems is unfeasible without a central platform. Successful PoLP implementation requires a system that allows detailed access policies to be defined and enforced in one place.
How to meet audit and regulatory requirements (RODO, NIS2)?
Organizations, especially in regulated sectors, must meet stringent security and data protection requirements. Regulations such as RODO, the NIS2 Directive and FSA recommendations impose detailed and undeniable audit trails, especially with regard to access to sensitive data and critical infrastructure.
The lack of a central system to manage and monitor privileged access makes it extremely difficult and labor-intensive to prepare for an audit. Auditors ask specific questions: “Please show who accessed the server with personal data in the last quarter?”, “What exact operations did administrator X perform on it on day Y?”.
Manual collection and analysis of distributed system logs is inefficient and often fails to provide evidence of the required quality. Having a strategy and tools to centrally log and archive each privileged session dramatically changes this situation. The audit process becomes simpler, faster and more reliable.
What an effective security strategy looks like: Centralization and auditability
Solving the above problems requires a strategic approach, which is based on creating a central control point for all privileged traffic. Instead of allowing users to connect directly to servers, all traffic is routed through a single, fortified system that acts as a digital security lock and becomes the sole intermediary for communication.
This architecture, often referred to as a privileged access gateway, allows policies to be managed in one place, and the user never learns the password to the end system. The second pillar is to provide full transparency and undeniable evidence. The modern approach is based on recording entire sessions in a form that can be played back like a video, which is invaluable for incident analysis and audit processes.
Implementing this approach transforms a chaotic and risky access management model into a structured, secure and fully auditable ecosystem. The organization gains not only protection from threats, but also a powerful tool for meeting regulatory requirements and optimizing the work of IT departments.
How does nFlo support organizations in protecting privileged access?
At nFlo, we understand that implementing an effective privileged access management (PAM) strategy is a process that requires not only technology, but more importantly, deep analysis, precise planning and implementation of robust procedures. Our portfolio of services is designed to support organizations every step of the way - from diagnosis to implementation and maintenance.
The first step is to understand the scale of the challenge. Our IT Security Architecture Analysis service allows us to identify where the biggest access control gaps are in your infrastructure. We assess your existing processes, verify your configurations, and pinpoint the areas where lack of visibility and accountability generate the greatest risk. To demonstrate the real risks of uncontrolled access, we conduct internal and external penetration tests, simulating how an attacker could exploit weaknesses in credential management.
Based on the information gathered, our experts help design a mature Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy, of which the PAM component is a key component. We advise on the selection and implementation of appropriate technology solutions, and help you create and enforce key procedures: access policies, double-checking rules or “out-of-band” verification processes. With nFlo, you gain a partner that transforms theoretical security principles into a viable and auditable security system.
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