What is privileged account and session management

Privileged Account and Session Management (PASM) is a subset of privileged access management that provides users with administrative access to critical accounts and business-sensitive endpoints such as data centers, databases, and applications through remote sessions. In fact, Gartner has listed PASM as one of the key pillars of PAM, alongside privilege escalation and delegated management and secure remote access.

With excessive privilege comes excessive risk, and the more administrative rights an employee has, the greater the attack surface. Emerging cyber trends show that attackers don’t always rely on sophisticated tools or attack methods to breach an organization’s security perimeter. All they need is a compromised privileged account or weak credentials to gain unrestricted access to business-sensitive information.

This just goes to show that cybersecurity is an ongoing process that must be approached from the ground up; this starts with strengthening the keys for privileged accounts and, by extension, the keys for privileged data. As hybrid working brings a whole new set of realities, organizations need to equip themselves with a foolproof mechanism to protect their privileged accounts, and incorporating PASM into their overall cybersecurity strategy will enable IT teams to manage critical user sessions and privileged access. Routines build strong governance.

The primary purpose of any PASM solution is to monitor and protect privileged user accounts and sessions, which helps IT teams track, control, log and audit access to critical information and endpoints.

Two areas of focus for PASM tools include:

• Privileged account management
• Privileged session management

Privileged account management

Often, some users have elevated privileges, meaning they have more permissions than they need to perform their activities. Therefore, there is always a gap between required permissions and granted permissions.

Additionally, when these overprivileged users leave the organization, it takes time for IT teams to deprovision their accounts and revoke the permissions associated with them. At the same time, malicious insiders may gain access to these orphaned accounts and use these privileges to gain unfair advantages over sensitive data. In this case, PASM solutions proved effective in eliminating any unmanaged standing privileges.

PASM tools come with encrypted vaults that allow IT teams and other administrative users to store and manage privileged identities such as user accounts, passwords, SSH keys, PKI certificates, and other authentication data.

Here's a quick snapshot of privileged account types:

Additionally, PASM tools provide powerful controls such as:

• A secure dynamic vault for storing and managing credentials, certificates, files and keys.
• Request release workflow for validating and approving password access requests.
• Role-based access provisioning for administrative permissions.
• Monitor and audit password-related user activity in real time, such as login attempts, password resets, and password policy changes.
• Scheduled password rotation for privileged endpoints.

These tools work based on the principle of least privilege (POLP), where users are granted minimal and sufficient access rights to perform their daily tasks. For tasks requiring elevated administrative rights, users must provide appropriate approvals to gain administrative access to confidential data. Additionally, PASM solutions include built-in privilege escalation controls that allow IT teams to ensure that access to privileged accounts and assets can be configured on a case-by-case basis.

In other words, IT teams can provide users with access to privileged resources for a specific period of time, rather than granting elevated privileges permanently. After the requested time range expires, access to these resources will be revoked and original (and minimal) user permissions will be restored.

Privileged session management

PASM solutions include unique session management controls to facilitate secure access to remote endpoints such as applications, data centers, databases, operating systems, network devices and cloud storage.

While the purpose of a VPN is to provide a secure gateway between two remote machines, PASM tools go a step further and provide more general context capabilities such as session recording, monitoring, shadowing, termination, auditing, and file transfer. This enables IT teams to monitor and control user sessions in real time and terminate any suspicious user sessions.

PASM’s session management capabilities enable IT teams to detect unauthorized sessions and effectively terminate any anomalous user activity. Additionally, privileged session management provides a detailed, immutable audit trail that often contains fundamental insights into the what, who, and when of each session, which can be further used in forensic investigations and security audits.

Additionally, PASM tools apply POLP at the device level, where non-administrative users without appropriate privilege escalation approval will not have access to critical endpoints. In other words, only users with valid requirements will be granted temporary administrative permissions to perform their tasks, and once their work is completed, their temporary permissions will be revoked and the resources' credentials will be automatically rotated to prevent any future unauthorized access access attempts.

Here are some standard session management features to note when considering a PASM solution:

• Live session collaboration, shadowing and termination
• Session recording, archiving and playback
• Secure remote access configuration
• Comprehensive audit trail, logging support and reporting

Why you should implement a PASM solution

• Privileged accounts falling into the wrong hands are a perfect recipe for disaster. While cyberattack methods continue to evolve, more commonly the simple abuse of administrative accounts or weak credentials is enough to put an organization at the center of a massive breach. All recent cyber attack trends are a testament to the fact that attackers often choose to keep it simple, and passwords happen to be the easiest targets in the event of a data breach.
• Loose password management, such as reusing and sharing privileged credentials, can expose organizations to bad actors. Manually managing passwords is not only tedious, but also a tricky business as any negligent insider could expose the credentials to attackers. When criminals handle privileged credentials, it can open the floodgates to thousands to millions of dollars worth of business-sensitive data.
• A powerful PASM solution can help IT teams protect and streamline their privileged access routines. PASM solutions give administrators centralized control over their privileged users, accounts, and assets and can ensure that credentials for these accounts are regularly reset and non-administrative users are blocked unless a valid access request is provided.
• Provides broad, real-time auditing of privileged user activity, helping IT teams identify and eliminate security blind spots and vulnerabilities to prevent any imminent attacks while complying with industry standards. Another good reason to switch to a PASM solution is its relevance to business functions, making it a versatile and industry-agnostic addition to any organization.

Advantages of deploying PASM solutions

The following are the key business benefits of deploying a PASM solution:

• Granular visibility into privileged accounts : Get a complete view of user activity across your enterprise network with comprehensive audit trails and alerts on privileged account usage.
• Enhance overall access governance : In addition to providing fine-grained access, PASM solutions include controls for monitoring and controlling geographically dispersed enterprise resources. Real-time monitoring of remote sessions increases overall transparency and enables IT administrators to prevent insider attacks through real-time session recording and shadowing.
• Proactively protect against insider threats : Identify anomalous behavior, block suspicious users and prevent security incidents with effective real-time insights into user sessions, and implement role-based access controls to ensure only privileged users can manage sensitive information.
• Ensure effective compliance with industry regulations : Seamlessly demonstrate compliance with various regulatory standards and government laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NERC-CIP and SOX.
• Enable granular access to external stakeholders and third parties : Compromised vendors or outsourced employees with access to privileged credentials can become weak links and potentially increase the chance of a cyber incident. However, with powerful PASM tools, administrators can leverage intelligent access workflows to seamlessly configure temporary passwordless privileged access for third parties to specific business systems and applications.

Essential PASM functionality to look for in a PAM solution

It is important for IT teams to make careful choices when selecting a PAM solution. The following is a list of core PASM capabilities that every PAM solution should include:

• Enterprise Credential Vault with enhanced multi-level data encryption at rest and in transit.
• Strong multi-factor authentication with options such as AD or LDAP, RADIUS, SAML and smart cards.
• Automatically discover privileged accounts, users, and resources on a regular basis.
• Granular password sharing options, role-based access provisioning, and pull-release workflows for password release.
• Security API to facilitate application-to-application communication for automated password checkout.
• Supports periodic password resets and integrity checks; password reset support for a variety of resources, including Windows and Linux computers, network devices, virtualization appliances, and DevOps and RPA tools.
• Privileged session monitoring and secure remote access configuration.
• Live session monitoring, recording and playback.
• Extensive session audit trails, and comprehensive logging and reporting options.
• Supports managing the lifecycle of SSL and TLS certificates and SSH keys.

How to incorporate PASM into your organization's overall PAM strategy

• Conduct a thorough audit of all administrative accounts and their corresponding permissions.
• User accounts are assigned the default minimum permissions, which ideally should be set to be as minimal as possible.
• Implement just-in-time (JIT) privilege escalation controls to enable time-limited access to critical resources.
• Identify inactive and orphaned user accounts and revoke all their associated permissions.
• Log and audit privileged activities and sessions across the enterprise.
• Enforce multi-factor authentication as an additional layer of security for privileged accounts.
• Educate your employees on the dangers of permissive privileged access hygiene through regular cybersecurity training, as the human element is one of the biggest risk factors when it comes to insider threats.

Implement effective PASM routines

PAM360 is an enterprise privileged access management solution that enables IT teams and administrative users to establish strict governance and gain granular control over critical user accounts and company resources.

PAM360's PASM module has niche features that help you effectively control and monitor access to critical data. Some powerful PASM features include:

• Secure enterprise credential vault for passwords, digital signatures and certificates, license keys, documents, images, service accounts and more, hardened with AES-256 encryption.
• Provide granular role-based access configuration for regular users and third-party contractors.
• Smart request release workflow for validating and approving password access requests.
• Advanced JIT privilege escalation control to provision non-administrative users with time-limited temporary access to privileged resources.
• Real-time notifications and alerts on password-related activity to detect and prevent anomalous operations, ensuring enhanced incident response.
• Seamless session monitoring, recording, and sharing help administrators keep tabs on live user sessions and immediately terminate suspicious activity.
• A comprehensive auditing and reporting module that provides detailed audit trails and extensive reporting on password access activities and privileged sessions, helping to identify the root causes of credential misuse and insider threats during security audits.
• Effective and ongoing compliance with regulations such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, SOX and PCI DSS can help your organization comply with industry standards.