What Is Privileged Access Management (PAM) | Fortinet (2024)

Privileged access management(PAM) is a system that assigns higher permission levels to accounts with access to critical resources and admin-level controls.PAM is based on the principle of least privilege, which is crucial to modern cybersecurity best practices.

Least privilege means making sure that users, programs, or processes have the bare minimum level of permission they need to perform their job or function. Users are only given access to read, write, or execute the documents or resources they require for their role. Least privilegecan be used to restrict access controls to applications, devices, processes, and systems. Control can also be role-based, such as applying specific privileges to business departments like human resources, IT, and marketing, or based on factors like location, seniority, or the time of day.

Least privilege includes PAM, which offers tools that ensure only the right people can access specific applications or files on a network.

Privileged accounts are especially lucrative to cyber criminals. Such accounts have access or permission to resources and systems that contain highly confidential or sensitive information, They can make administrative changes to applications, IT infrastructure, and systems, and organizations use them to install hardware, make infrastructure updates, and reset passwords.

As a result, they present a serious security risk to organizations. Cyber criminals are especially interested in targeting privileged account credentials, which creates a pressing need for organizations to protect them.

There are many types of privileged accounts. Human privileged accounts include super users, domain administrators, local admins, emergency accounts, and privileged business users. It also includes non-human accounts, such as application and service accounts and secure socket shell (SSH) keys.

PAM encompasses privileged identity management (PIM), which lets organizations monitor and protect superuser accounts.

Privileged credentials, or privileged passwords, are the login details protecting privileged accounts and critical systems, which include applications, human users, and service accounts. A good example of privileged credentials is SSH keys, which are used to access servers and highly sensitive assets.

Privileged accounts are among the biggest targets for cyber criminals and consequently are one of the main sources of data breaches.Forrester Researchinsight suggests that 80% of breaches involve privileged credentials. Many major data breaches, such as the 2013 Target attack, were found to be a result of stolen credentials and could have been prevented if the organization had restricted access permissions.

Privileged access management solutions are crucial to protecting the privileged accounts that exist across businesses’ on-premises and cloud environments. Privileged accounts often hold the key to confidential and sensitive information that can be hugely damaging for organizations if they fall into the wrong hands.

Privileged accounts are especially vulnerable because of the following risks and challenges:

It is easy for organizations to overprovision account privileges to resources that do not need them. Some users also end up accumulating new privileges or retaining privileges they no longer need when their job role changes. This privilege excess, in addition to the growth of cloud adoption and digital transformation, can lead to the organization’s attack surface expanding.

Having admin account privileges beyond what users require increases the risk of exposure to malware and hackers stealing their passwords. This allows unauthorized entities to access all privileges across an account, including all the data on an infected computer, or launch an attack against other computers or servers on the network.

It is common for growing organizations to have old privileged accounts that are no longer used sprawled across their systems. For example, accounts belonging to former employees can be abandoned but still retain privileged access rights. These dormant accounts are vulnerable to hackers and can provide them with a backdoor into organizations’ networks and systems.

Organizations therefore need to retain full visibility of their account access levels and remove any with unnecessary privileges.

PAM tools are crucial to increasing security, protecting businesses from hackers, and preventing cyberattacks.

Like all people, privileged users, such as domain administrators, struggle to remember passwords across their various account logins. They are also a major target for cyber criminals, which means they especially need to use strong passwords and not recycle credentials over different accounts. PAM solutions monitor privileged accounts and store them in a digital vault to reduce the risk of cyberattacks.

A privileged access management solution reduces the need for users to remember multiple passwords and allows super users to manage privileged access from one location, instead of using multiple applications and systems. It also helps organizations prevent insider attacks by former employees with access rights that have not been effectively deprovisioned. Alerts and session management also allow super admins to identify threats in real time.

Another key advantage is that it ensures compliance with ever-stringent data and privacy regulations. PAM encourages organizations to restrict access to sensitive data and systems, require further approvals, and deploy additional security tools like multi-factor authentication (MFA) on privileged accounts. PAM auditing tools also provide businesses with a clear audit trail, which is crucial to meeting regulations like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

PAM is a subset of IAM, which is a framework of processes, policies, and technologies that allow organizations to manage their digital identities. With IAM, organizations can authenticate and authorize all of their users—including internal employees, external customers, partners, and vendors—across their entire attack surface and tools like Active Directory.

PAM systems are specifically focused on managing and securing administrators and users with elevated privileges.

Organizations must deploy and integrate both IAM and PAM to effectively prevent cyberattacks. Integrating them reduces security risks, improves user experience, and is listed as a requirement by auditors and regulators.Other tools that are crucial to IAM, such as MFA, can be used for secure access, which is necessary to meeting compliance requirements set out by standards like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Using IAM as the interface also improves privileged users’ experience. It enables them to access PAM from the same location they use to access all other corporate resources. Furthermore, IAM enables organizations to automatically terminate privilege access when users leave the organization, which is not always the case with privileged access management tools.

FortiPAM provides privileged access management and control for elevated and privileged accounts, processes, and systems across the entire IT environment.

FortiPAM is an integral component of the FortinetIdentity and Access Management (IAM)solution which allows organizations to provide tight security for privileged accounts and privileged credentials. FortiPAM provides the least privileged access to the most sensitive resources within an organization. It enables end-to-end management of privileged accounts, control of privileged user access, and visibility of account usage including monitoring and audit capabilities. These features allow FortiPAM to introduce zero-trust principles to privileged accounts and dramatically lower an organization’s overall attack surface by ensuring privileged accounts and privileged credentials are not misused by accident, by threat actors, or by malicious insiders.

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