For a modern-day cyber attacker, initial access to an application is more than half the battle. With it, they are free to pursue their objectives, which likely include moving about freely to find data to sell or hold for ransom.
Most access to critical systems and data is facilitated by user accounts – digital identities tied to specific individuals. So, it’s no surprise that IT and security teams have focused so much of their time, energy, and resources on managing and securing them.
However, as any cyber attacker will tell you, one way in is just as good as another so long as it provides access. As for ways in, user accounts are like front doors. They’re usually well-locked and have lots of eyes on them.
There is, however, another type of doorway into most enterprise environments. It’s an entry point off the beaten path, generally not monitored, and often entirely forgotten by IT and security teams. I’m referring to service accounts, and software-to-software component identities that pose serious security risks to the many organizations that aren’t managing them closely today.
The nature of service accounts and their risks
Service accounts are similar to user accounts in one crucial way: they provide the access needed to run all kinds of things, including applications, virtualized compute resources, automated processes, and IoT device management. Enabling many key activities, service accounts facilitate access to systems, applications, and data. Unlike user accounts, however, they’re not tied to individual people. Service accounts are typically generated when a new application or service is being pushed to production. Their creation is, for example, one of the key steps in having an OS grant an application or service access to system resources and data it needs. Service accounts are, in a way, the equivalent of user login credentials – just for machines instead of people.
The nature of service accounts is what makes them a significant security risk. They’re not associated with any specific people, they’re usually embedded in lower levels of the technology stack, and they’re usually touched by humans only once – during installs. Often the people doing the installations use vendors’ default passwords – and those passwords are rarely, if ever, changed.
These characteristics make service accounts vulnerable because they’re initially set up and tested, but then, in many cases, they’re not actively tracked. That means they can easily get overlooked and become a risk.
For bad actors, these traits turn service accounts into easy doorways to step through to get into enterprise environments and access all the valuable resources within.
Current approaches fall short
There are best practices that companies can follow to try to manage and secure their service accounts more effectively. But these largely manual approaches are labor-intensive and time-consuming. They involve kludgy, manual processes of looking back in time to figure out which service accounts are associated with which apps and services, and which service accounts touch which physical and virtual servers or other IT resources. Even if all that discovery is made, there still remains the question of who initially created the service accounts and what passwords they used. Answers to all these questions are rarely readily available.
Then there’s the scary unknown of which particular applications and services use which service accounts. IAM and PAM solutions can be configured to include these accounts and log their use. Without the application-mapped relationships being known and visible, will a service account password change cause unexpected failures in critical apps or business processes? Chances are, the answer is yes.
The bottom line is that manually managing service accounts across dozens of spreadsheets is time-consuming, costly, error-prone, and risky. In short, it’s generally not a viable option.
TrueFort Cloud – The best of both worlds
Here at TrueFort, we understand the challenges customers face in dealing with service account security risks. They want to close those security gaps quickly, but they don’t want to be saddled with a solution that’s not flexible enough to meet their unique needs.
That’s why we’ve created TrueFort Cloud. This cloud-based solution is designed to significantly reduce customers’ service account risks with a very short time-to-value.
It has powerful features for identifying and eliminating service account security risks. TrueFort Cloud is our industry-leading Zero Trust segmentation and workload protection platform.
Beyond TrueFort Cloud’s extensive, out-of-the-box customization features, TrueFort offers high-quality professional services. Delivered by our security and IT experts, these services are geared toward helping customers ensure that their TrueFort Cloud deployment meets whatever unique needs and specific requirements they may have.
Functions for mitigating service account security risks
With TrueFort Cloud, customers greatly enhance their security posture around service accounts with functions such as:
- Automatically uncovering service account dependencies
- Identifying service account owners
- Determining active and inactive (orphaned) service accounts without any references in customers’ CMDBs
- Providing a detailed inventory of service accounts that are executing in an environment
- Differentiating between end-user service accounts and those used for automated processes
- Providing visibility into how often service accounts are used
In summary, TrueFort has taken its best-of-breed workload behavioral analysis expertise and extended it with a purpose-built solution for remediating enterprises’ service account risks. The resulting, comprehensive offering provides customers with exactly what they need – an effective, flexible, and cost-efficient security fix for service account risks. Only the right people have the keys to that locked door, and no one has any keys they don’t need. Available today, TrueFort Cloud offers enterprises an intelligent and timely way to cross uncontrolled service accounts off their lists of security worries.
If you think it’s time to address your organization’s service account security risks, our experts here at TrueFort are happy to help. Click here to discover more and, if you like what you see, arrange a demo.
