In this guest blog post from Azure Marketplace partner Silverfort, its Chief Strategy Officer, Ron Rasin, explains how his company helps enterprises prevent cyberattacks by finding, securing, and monitoring service accounts.
Active Directory service accounts represent one of the most significant, yet often overlooked, security risks. The role of these non-human identities is critical for automating system-to-system communications, performing essential tasks, and managing the underlying infrastructure. Despite their importance, they are often unmanaged, poorly secured, and excluded from traditional security controls, which makes them a prime target for cyberattacks.
Due to their widespread access and lack of oversight, Active Directory-based service accounts pose significant risks to an organization's security.
Security risks of service accounts
Lack of visibility
Inadequate visibility is one of the most significant challenges organizations face when trying to secure service accounts. Their complex interdependencies with multiple processes, applications, and systems make it challenging to accurately track and monitor their behavior. As these accounts are typically set up and forgotten, many organizations struggle to maintain a clear inventory of all the service accounts in their environment, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
Since these accounts are often unmonitored, attackers can compromise them and use them to move laterally across the network, access sensitive systems, and escalate privileges.
Exclusion from privileged access management and multi-factor authentication
Service accounts are frequently excluded from traditional security controls like privileged access management (PAM) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Since service accounts are non-human identities, they cannot comply with MFA, which typically requires user interaction to authenticate access attempts. Additionally, their passwords are often hardcoded or integrated deeply into applications, making them difficult to rotate or manage through PAM solutions. Attempting to change or rotate these passwords can lead to significant disruptions, such as breaking critical processes or causing system failures.
This leaves service accounts vulnerable to compromise, as attackers can gain and maintain access for extended periods without triggering alerts from standard security controls. The inability to implement these critical security measures creates a blind spot, making service accounts an attractive target for attackers looking to compromise privileged credentials and escalate their access within the network.
Overprivileged access
Service accounts are often provisioned with unnecessary access rights and privileges. It is common for admins to grant broad permissions to service accounts in order to ensure seamless functionality, disregarding the principle of least privilege in doing so. As a result, the potential impact of a compromised service account is increased, as threat actors can use the account's elevated privileges to gain access to sensitive systems and information.
This over-privileging is particularly concerning in Active Directory environments, where service accounts often have unrestricted access to the entire network, making them a prime target for attackers looking to escalate their access
How Silverfort secures service accounts
Securing service accounts requires a proactive and automated approach. Available in Azure Marketplace, Silverfort addresses the unique challenges of securing Active Directory-based service accounts, ensuring that no service account is left unmanaged or not protected.
Comprehensive discovery
Silverfort automatically discovers and identifies all service accounts in your Active Directory environment, including those that have gone unnoticed. This discovery process provides organizations with complete visibility into every service account, its associated dependencies, and its risk profile. Silverfort detects service accounts by analyzing their behavior patterns and naming conventions, ensuring that no service account remains hidden.
By gaining full visibility into all service accounts, security teams can better manage and monitor these accounts, reducing the chances of them being compromised by attackers.
Continuous real-time monitoring
Silverfort monitors the behavior of service accounts, tracking authentication activity and identifying any anomalies or suspicious behavior. By establishing a baseline for each service account's normal behavior, Silverfort can detect deviations that could indicate compromise. If any suspicious activity is detected, Silverfort triggers an immediate alert or blocks the unauthorized access attempt, preventing attackers from exploiting compromised service accounts.
This real-time monitoring capability ensures that service accounts are no longer blind spots in an organization’s security posture. Security teams can quickly respond to threats and mitigate potential breaches before significant damage occurs.
Tailored access policies
Silverfort automatically suggests custom access policies for each service account in accordance with its typical usage patterns. The purpose of these policies is to ensure that service accounts have only the amount of access necessary to perform their designated duties. By restricting access for service accounts, Silverfort reduces the potential impact of a compromised account.
Additionally, Silverfort allows organizations to seamlessly implement these policies without changing the underlying infrastructure or rotating passwords. As a result, service accounts remain secure without disrupting critical business operations.
By prioritizing service account security, organizations can mitigate the risk of compromised service accounts being deployed by malicious actors in cyberattacks.
Next steps
Interested in seeing how Silverfort can help you to discover, monitor, and protect service accounts? Please visit Silverfort.com for more information or request a demo.
Updated Mar 24, 2025
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