The Hidden Trick Hackers Hope You Never Discover

Hackers do not want you to wake up to the vulnerability that your unmanaged service accounts have created in your environment, because if they did, they would lose one of their best attack vectors against your organization. 

Hackers focus on finding weaknesses that they can exploit in your company’s IT defenses. When we were all safe inside the same building, the primary defense used to be firewalls. Now, in the distributed world where users can connect from anywhere, these attacks focus on identity. Every identity in your organization is a potential target for hackers. Once an account is compromised or taken over, a skilled cyber-criminal can escalate access, exploit additional vulnerabilities and extract a high price in both hard dollar costs and reputation. 

The Blind Spot in IT Security 

Understanding this shift towards focusing on identity, organizations have invested heavily in securing their identities and the accounts associated with them. The common practice is to focus on accounts associated with human beings. These seem more tangible and can be tied back to a user with a title, in a role, in a department, with a manager. These familiar concepts lend themselves more easily to the models for role management, access reviews, and automated onboarding and offboarding. Implementing measures to manage and secure these user accounts is an out-of-the-box functionality for most IDM and IGA products.

If you lived in a house in a bad neighborhood and only put locks on your doors, would you feel safe? Would you trust that no one could break into your home? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding no. To feel completely protected, you would need to not only secure the doors but also bar the windows. This is why managing only the human accounts on your network is only a small part of IT security and leaves your organization highly vulnerable to compromise. 

What are the windows in this example? If you are not sure, we have made our point.

Service accounts are the blind spots in your IT security program. Unmanaged service accounts are a bigger attack surface than the entirety of your human identities.

Unlike human accounts, service accounts operate in the background. The takeover of a service account may go completely unnoticed because it will not disrupt a user’s personal access, which would raise a red flag.

Why Service Accounts are Easy Targets 

Service accounts often have elevated privileges used by various applications to access and manage valuable resources. Many times, the same service account is used over and over by internal development or integrators to provide access across multiple applications and systems.

Service accounts bring unique challenges to IT security due to their vulnerabilities and lack of oversight:

• Often rely on static and shared passwords, rarely rotated, if at all.
• Proliferate uncontrollably, much like unmanaged groups.
• Frequently lack documentation on their purpose, access, or ownership.
• Contribute significantly to IT debt, making clean-up efforts tougher.
• Are often overlooked or pushed aside in security initiatives.
• Create a weak link in the IT security chain when vulnerabilities combine.

Take Steps to Address Service Account Vulnerabilities 

The service account vulnerability calls for focused identity data hygiene. This is a two-step process. The first is to “Get Clean.” The second is to “Stay Clean.”

Getting clean starts with visibility and analysis. All the service accounts spread across the organization must be identified and evaluated. This is done through a series of discovery processes that collect and catalog existing service accounts. It combines existing tools and an aggregation and governance solution that operate in the specific world of service accounts. A set of controls is then applied to the inventory of service accounts to determine the relative health of each and answer questions such as:

• Which accounts have or do not have an owner?
•  Is the owner still with the organization?
• Do they have a comprehensive description?
• Of what groups are they a member?
• What access do they have to permissions and applications?
• How often does the same service account reoccur across the enterprise?
• Are there logs of access history that will indicate which service accounts are active and which are abandoned?

Peer analysis then can be used to start to fill in the blanks. An example would be uncovering that three service accounts have similar group memberships and application access to others in this department owned by this current manager, implying similarity. Utilizing a service account review process that can both extrapolate missing data but also kick off a verification from the intended target which ensures the clean-up is actually accurate. This is a journey that takes a lot of time and interaction. Implementing processes that can run campaigns that are delegated closer to the potential owners will start to raise the sunken ship from the depths.

Four Steps to Staying Clean

As the existing service account mess is being cleaned up, it is critical that all ongoing and new service accounts be fully managed to ensure that they are “Staying Clean.” Implementing and managing a service account lifecycle is critical to maintaining a clean environment:

1. Create a Workflow: The creation of a service account needs to be included in a workflow that requires complete documentation of the owner, descriptions, use, and access granted to the service account.
2. Retire Inactive Accounts: Moreover, service accounts should be retired when they are no longer used instead of being reused for different purposes.
3. Transfer Ownership: When an owner leaves the organization or changes roles, his managed service accounts must go through the same transition to a new owner who accepts responsibility for these accounts.
4. Password Rotation: This practice needs to be implemented, and service accounts that contain privileged access should be added to the Privileged Account Management platform to ensure that additional level of security and visibility.

Stop Overlooking the Orphans of IT Security

In many ways, service accounts are the orphans of IT security, often forgotten and mistreated. They operate unseen in the background, making them easy to overlook but no less critical to protect. Despite their invisibility to end-user operations, these accounts frequently hold elevated privileges, granting them access to sensitive systems and data stores. This makes unmanaged service accounts a prime target for cyber-criminals, offering a hidden pathway to exploit vulnerabilities, escalate permissions, and cause damage that can compromise the organization’s security posture. Ignoring this silent threat doesn’t just impair IT hygiene; it risks the entire organization’s infrastructure.

Failing to address the weaknesses of service accounts means leaving a gaping hole in your security strategy while exposing your systems to unnecessary and avoidable dangers. The good news is that advancements in governance applications have paved the way for more thorough management and oversight of service accounts.

These tools now extend the familiar frameworks used for human account management, offering systematic clean-up processes and lifecycle solutions tailored specifically to service accounts. By bringing these shadow accounts into view, organizations can implement consistent ownership, rigorous documentation, and robust access controls, drastically reducing their exposure to threats. It is time for service accounts to step out of the shadows and take their rightful place as a core element of IT security, transforming them from hidden liabilities to fully managed assets.