Beyond Buzzwords: The Hidden Dangers of Ephemeral Accounts in Cybersecurity
Summary: A Hacker News contributor argues that ephemeral accounts, created in real time with random names through a PAM solution and deleted after use, leave unresolved Security Identifiers in audits and file share permissions and produce endpoint logs that cannot tie an action to a person. The article notes that attackers follow the same pattern of compromising an account, creating a new one, and adding permissions for persistence, and that many companies ignore account creation and elevation event IDs such as 4720, 4722, 4724, and 4732.
Bottom line: When an account like admin-temp-as8d9e8 is granted AD Enterprise Admin rights, used for an unknown action, and then deleted, incident response teams are left correlating logs across two disparate systems while the Domain Controller's audit logs rotate - and the attacker's persistence technique looks identical to the sanctioned workflow.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- Identity & Access Management
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