Question 1

What is Privileged Access?

Accepted Answer

Privileged access is a special ability to perform tasks that are sensitive in nature. These include abilities such as shutting down critical systems, installing and managing device drivers, updating applications, configuring networks, and administration of servers and endpoints.

Question 2

What is Privileged Access Management?

Accepted Answer

Privileged Access Management refers to a holistic process of protecting privileged accounts in an organization by restricting, controlling, and monitoring access to privileged credentials.

Question 3

What is a privileged password?

Accepted Answer

Passwords that can grant access to privileged assets in your organization are called privileged passwords. Access to these passwords should be restricted, controlled, and strictly monitored.

Question 4

What is privileged password management?

Accepted Answer

Privileged password management incorporates various measures such as periodic password rotation and enforcing complexity rules on passwords used to protect sensitive IT assets. Using these measures along with access controls to restrict and regulate access to these passwords can help organizations secure their senstive assets from internal and external threats.

Question 5

Why is PAM important for your organization?

Accepted Answer

Organizations struggle with restricting and regulating access to sensitive assets. PAM solutions have provisions that can help control, restrict, and monitor privileged accounts and access. Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions help discover and manage privileged accounts and provide complete visibility into the existence and access history of all privileged accounts in the organization.

Question 6

What are privileged accounts?

Accepted Answer

Any account that provides users with special abilities beyond that of a standard user is called a privileged account. A few common examples are domain admin accounts, local administrator accounts, non-human privileged accounts used for process automation, service accounts, and break glass accounts.

Question 7

Who are privileged users?

Accepted Answer

Users who are allowed or authorized to perform tasks that a standard user is not allowed to do are called privileged users. These users often have permanent access to administrator accounts and sensitive files. It is highly advisable to eliminate permanent access to sensitive accounts and grant Just-in-Time based access to sensitive accounts.

Question 8

What are the types of privileged accounts?

Accepted Answer

Privileged accounts can be classified into two major groups. Human and non-human privileged accounts. Human accounts include Domain Admin accounts, Local user accounts, and Local Administrator accounts. Non-human privileged accounts include service accounts, application accounts, and accounts used by network devices.

Question 9

What are privileged credentials?

Accepted Answer

Privileged credentials are used to grant elevated access to applications and devices in an network. They are often called “Keys to your Kingdom” as they could grant unrestricted access to your IT network. They are credentials often tasked to protect sensitive assets in a network. They are also widely referred to as secrets within DevOps environments.

Question 10

How is PAM implemented?

Accepted Answer

Privileged Access Management solutions should be implemented with a deployment plan in place. The success criteria of a PAM implementation is restricting access and enforcing controls without impacting productivity of the organization.

Question 11

What are some PAM best practices?

Accepted Answer

Some of the top privileged access management best practices are

Consolidate all your privileged account for centralized management.
Create and enforce password policies with expiry and complexity rules.
Enforce Multi-factor authentication across all human and non-human privileged identities.
Eliminate standing access to privileged accounts and enforce context based just-in-time access.
Monitor and record all privileged sessions.
Track and audit all privileged activities.
Enforce separation of privileges on administrator accounts.
Enforce separation of duties between administrators.

Question 12

What is secrets management?

Accepted Answer

Organizations often use multiple applications that are developed in house and out sourced for running operations on a day to day basis. These applications communicate with eachother either programmatically or through human intervention and need to authenticate their identity frequently. Privileged credentials, SSH keys, and tokens are used to authenticate their identity. These credentials are called as Secrets.

Secrets management refers to the tools or strategies involved in securing and managing these secrets.

Question 13

What are hardcoded/embedded passwords?

Accepted Answer

When two non human identities need to communicate with each other, they need to authenticate their identities. For this purpose, developers often write the credentials into the code in plain text. Credentials that are available in plain text are addressed as hardcoded credentials or embedded credentials.

Question 14

Why secrets management is important?

Accepted Answer

Secrets are found all around an organization’s cyber space as hardcoded-credentials in dockers, as keys in various internally and externally sourced applications, vulnerability scanners, CI/CD pipelines etc.

Secrets are also used as a part of robotic process automation. Automated process offer a lot of advantages as they are extremely efficient when compared to processes carried out by humans. On the flipside, automated tasks are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. Cybercriminals understand this and repeatedly target secrets to gain unfettered access to assets. To protect the organization, it is important to protect the secrets and regulate access to them with the highest security measures available.

Question 15

What are standing privileges?

Accepted Answer

Standing privileges are access rights that are granted perpetually to a user or other machines. These privileges grant access to the underlying assets permanently and is extremely risky when the underlying assets are sensitive. External threats and malicious insiders can exploit the access and cause devastating damage.

To insulate organizations from these threats, it is recommended to grant ephemeral access (or) Just-In-Time access to IT assets.

Question 16

What is Just-in-Time (JIT) access?

Accepted Answer

Just-in-Time access is a concept of granting temporary time limited access to sensitive assets to a user at the right time. JIT access ensures that the concerned user has access to the privileged asset when required without having standing access to it. By adopting JIT based access provisioning, you can limit exposure to intruders and malicious insiders and improve your organization’s security posture.

Question 17

What are the risks of standing privileges?

Accepted Answer

Standing privileges grant permanent (or) perpetual access to IT assets. When users are granted standing privileges for performing certain tasks, they will be able to access the IT asset even after the task is completed. The access rights is completely unnecessary and could potentially be misused by the user.

Around 81% of all privilege misuse is carried out by an insider. These insiders are granted standing access which gets abused either due to negligence or malicious intent.

Question 18

How to reduce standing privileges?

Accepted Answer

To reduce standing privileges, you need to adopt a holistic strategy that involves the following steps:

Consolidate all privileged identities into a centralized vault.
Gain visibility into who has access to which identities along with how and when the privileges are used in the organization.
Revoke access to these privileged identities from the corresponding users.

All these steps can be easily performed using a PAM solution. A PAM solution can discover all privileged credentials present in the IT network and consolidate them inside the centralized repository. It can help revoke access from users by performing a remote password reset on all the consolidated privileged identities.

Once access is revoked, you can use the PAM solution to grant JIT based access and minimize the impact on productivity.

Question 19

What is a PAM System?

Accepted Answer

A PAM system is also called a privileged access management system that helps control access to the most sensitive assets inside an organization. It is a subset of identity and access management which focusses on regulating access to all assets inside an organization.

Question 20

What is a privileged access management tool?

Accepted Answer

A privileged access management tool is software that helps control and monitor privileged access (level of access that is beyond any standard user) in an organization. These tools are made with capabilities that let you grant restricted, temporary access to sensitive assets within the organization.

Question 21

What are admin privileges?

Accepted Answer

Admin privileges are permissions that generally allow users to install and modify applications on devices. These privileges are beyond standard users' levels and are usually granted to IT administrators ephemerally.

Question 22

What is the principle of least privilege?

Accepted Answer

The principle of least privilege is based on the zero-trust concept that instructs us to grant the minimal level of access only when absolutely required. The principle of least privilege is a core aspect of privileged access management solutions and is enforced by granting just-in-time, just-enough access to sensitive assets in the organization.

Question 23

What is a privileged identity and access management tool?

Accepted Answer

Privileged access management tools help control and regulate access to sensitive assets. Privileged access management is considered a subset of identity and access management which focuses on controlling access to IT infrastructure.

Question 24

What is Privileged Access Governance?

Accepted Answer

Privileged access governance encompasses provisioning and deprovisioning access to sensitive IT assets, sharing access with just-enough permissions to fulfill their responsibilities, ensuring access to assets are ephemeral and properly tracked. It provides holistic visibility over access to sensitive assets and ensures access is granted only to people who need it, only when they need it.

Question 25

What is PAM as a Service?

Accepted Answer

When organizations are not able to administer a privileged access management solution by themselves, they often outsource the task to contractors and service providers. These service providers can offer privileged access management as a service to their customers. PAM as a Service can be offered with different administrative configurations. The service providers can simply host the solution while the organization manages access completely or the service providers can cover end-to-end privileged access management for their customers.

Question 26

What are Privileged Access Workstations?

Accepted Answer

Privileged access workstations (PAW) are special devices that are designated to carry out all tasks that require administrator rights such as managing the Active Directory, databases, servers, applications, and important assets.

These workstations usually have hardened security measures that protect them from internet threats and other internal and external attack vectors.

Question 27

What is Privileged Account and Session Management?

Accepted Answer

Privileged account and session management is a sub-domain of privileged access management that focusses on protecting identities by storing them inside an encrypted vault and granting restricted access to users only when required. They also have comprehensive context-based access controls that govern remote access by allowing admins to record, monitor, and track remote sessions in the network.

Question 28

What is Privileged User Management?

Accepted Answer

The set of controls used to monitor, control, and track what the users with highest access privileges in the organization is called privileged user management. These controls are commonly found in privileged access management solutions.

Question 29

What is Service Account Governance?

Accepted Answer

Service accounts are domain accounts whose credentials are used to run services, processes and are often cached locally. Subjecting service accounts to password security practices like periodic password resets can cause these dependent services and processes to come to a grinding halt. Service account governance helps manage these sensitive accounts by maintaining a comprehensive list of dependencies of each service account. It also makes enforcing password security practices viable by ensuring that any change to the credentials is propagated to the dependencies.

Question 30

What are Zero Standing Privileges?

Accepted Answer

Zero standing privileges is a concept where no user, regardless of their position or requirement, is granted permanent access to privileges. The mechanism dictates users to request elevated access to business-critical resources whenever required. This protects the organization from internal and external threats.

Question 31

What is third-party access management?

Accepted Answer

Third parties such as vendors and contractors regularly work with organizations to roll out new solutions and maintain existing solutions. The nature of their work requires them to have access to some of the most sensitive devices in the organization. Controlling, monitoring, and tracking their access is important for the organization’s security. Third-party access management is a sub-domain of privileged access management that focusses exclusively on securing third-party access to internal systems.

Question 32

What is Remote Privileged Access Management (RPAM)?

Accepted Answer

What is Remote Privileged Access Management (RPAM)?

Remote privileged access management (RPAM) is not a separate category of privileged access management solution but more of a use case that focuses on how access is monitored, managed, and controlled, particularly for privileged users accessing systems remotely. RPAM comes in handy to establish secure, remote connections with privileged devices within OT environments, de-militarized zones, and other air-gapped environments.

What are Non-human Identities (NHIs)?

An Introduction to Non-Human Identities

OT and IoT Advancements

Artificial Intelligence in Play

What is a non-human Identity (NHI)?

Are Non-human Identities and Machine Identities Different?

Where can non-human identities be found?

Distribution of NHI’s on Cloud Service Providers

Distribution of NHIs in Code and CI/CD Pipelines

Distribution of NHIs across SaaS Applications

What are the challenges in managing non-human identities?

What is non-human Identity management (NHIM)?

Non-human identity management (NHIM) - A Definition

What are the types of non-human identities?

Attributes associated with non-human identities

What are the major differences between human and non-human identities?

Heavy Impact If NHIs are Compromised

9 Best practices to securely manage non-human identities (NHIs) in 2025

Steps in Managing Non-Human Identities

How Securden Unified PAM can help effectively secure NHIs?