Mastering Privileged Account and Session Management: 6 Best Practices to Implement in Your Organization

Cybercriminals will often target an organization’s privileged accounts, which provide a pathway to highly valuable assets. If compromised, privileged accounts and sessions can be used for malicious activity, potentially causing cybersecurity incidents. These incidents may lead to operational disruptions, financial losses, compliance issues, and reputational damage.

This article provides best practices to help your organization implement privileged account and session management (PASM) and address security risks related to privileged user activity.

What is PASM?

Gartner’s Buyers’ Guide for Privileged Access Management (subscription required) characterizes privileged account and session management (PASM) as a subcategory of privileged access management (PAM).

While PAM involves controlling and securing privileged access for users, accounts, and systems in general, PASM specifically focuses on managing, monitoring, and securing privileged accounts and sessions during which these accounts are used.

With PASM, you can control and track the actual activity of privileged accounts in real time. PASM solutions can streamline the management of privileged accounts, log user actions in privileged sessions, and terminate them if suspicious activity is detected. 

Why is adopting PASM crucial for your organization?

Without adequate protection, privileged accounts and sessions may be exploited by malicious actors seeking access to your organization’s sensitive assets. For instance, cybercriminals may leverage compromised credentials to force their way into your IT infrastructure. Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report shows that stolen account credentials were used in 24% of data breach incidents in 2023. 

Insiders, such as employees, partners, and third-party contractors, may also harm your organization while using privileged accounts, whether intentionally or unwittingly. According to the same report, a human element was involved in 68% of data breaches in 2023.

Compromised credentials and insider threats, along with cyber attacks like phishing and ransomware, can cause severe security incidents. These incidents can put sensitive data and critical systems at risk, leading to serious consequences for your organization, such as:

Data breaches

In a security incident, attackers may steal, corrupt, or leak your sensitive data, including customer information, financial records, intellectual property, or privileged user credentials. Cybercriminals can take advantage of that data for further attacks, such as identity theft, fraud, or spear-phishing campaigns targeting both your organization and your stakeholders. 

If malicious actors gain access to your organization’s trade secrets and intellectual property, it could fall into your competitors’ hands, putting your competitive advantage at risk.

Operational disruptions

Incidents stemming from poor privileged account and session management can negatively influence your organization’s performance. For instance, security incidents can render essential systems inoperable, halting your business operations. Employees may be unable to access the tools, data, or networks necessary to perform their tasks, resulting in reduced productivity, poor customer service, and missed project deadlines.

Moreover, restoring affected systems and processes after a disruption often requires significant time and IT resources.

Compliance issues

Organizations in many industries are subject to strict acts, laws, and regulations, such as the GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, DORA, and NIS2. Many of them mandate businesses to implement security measures to control and monitor privileged access to sensitive data. Without effective PASM in place you may fail to comply with these regulatory requirements, resulting in improperly secured data. This can lead to huge penalties and even lawsuits.

Financial losses

A single security incident or data breach can cost your organization money directly. You could end up shelling out expenses for post-incident recovery, ransomware payouts, restitution payments, and non-compliance fines. For instance, HIPAA penalties can reach $50,000 per violation with a maximum of $1.5 million per year. Incidents also often lead to indirect costs like lost business opportunities. As of this year data breaches reached an average of $4.88 million in losses per incident, according to the Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report by IBM.

Reputational damage

Security incidents can significantly damage your organization’s reputation, reducing customer trust and stakeholder confidence. They often attract media attention, especially if sensitive customer data is exposed. Negative publicity makes it difficult for organizations to retain existing customers and attract new ones, leading to significant losses in revenue.

Effective PASM can help your organization enhance the security of privileged accounts and sessions and minimize the risk of negative consequences.

6 best practices for privileged account and session management

PASM implementation can be complex without the right approach. Below, we’ve outlined six essential best practices you can start with to manage privileged accounts and sessions securely and effectively.

1. Automate the discovery and management of privileged accounts

Automating the discovery of privileged accounts is a critical step in implementing PASM. As organizations grow and develop their IT infrastructures, new privileged accounts within them are created. When left unmanaged or unknown to IT teams, these accounts can pose a serious risk to security.

Automated discovery enables your organization to continuously identify all existing privileged accounts, including unmanaged ones. By uncovering such accounts, you reduce the chance of unauthorized privileged account activity going undetected. Once all privileged accounts are discovered, you can start managing them all in one place, e.g., setting secure passwords, limiting user access to them, and configuring password rotation schedules. Automated management can help streamline the handling of privileged accounts while reducing the workload on IT teams and minimizing the risk of human error.

Syteca is a cybersecurity platform that enables organizations worldwide to manage human-related security risks. As an element of Syteca PAM, privileged account discovery lets you manage privileged access more securely and effectively. Syteca’s account discovery allows you to schedule regular scans for privileged accounts across multiple domains, receive email notifications about newly uncovered accounts, and manage them all in one place.

2. Enforce the principle of least privilege

The principle of least privilege (PoLP) aims to minimize the risks associated with excessive access permissions. PoLP ensures that users, applications, and systems accessing privileged accounts only have the minimum permissions necessary to carry out assigned tasks. By limiting access in such a way, you can reduce the exposure of sensitive assets to both external attackers and insider threats.

To successfully enforce PoLP, it’s vital to continuously review and adjust account access permissions based on changes in employee roles and organizational needs. Privileged access management solutions can significantly simplify this task.

Syteca PAM allows you to granularly manage user access to your critical endpoints and establish access approval workflows for on-demand access provisioning.

3. Implement secure password management

A secure password management process is essential to safeguarding privileged accounts and mitigating the risks associated with compromised credentials. Password management solutions help you implement robust policies to make sure that the passwords on privileged accounts are strong and protected.

Ensure secure storage and streamlined management of employee passwords with the help of a reliable password management solution. Restrict access to privileged account passwords to as few individuals as possible. Rotate passwords for privileged accounts regularly, according to the frequency matching your organization’s security risk profile and compliance needs.

Dedicated solutions like Syteca’s password management tool can help automate most of these processes. Syteca uses military-grade encryption to secure passwords, stores them in a secure vault, and enables authorized users to work with privileged accounts without exposing the accounts’ passwords. For the ultimate protection, Syteca offers password check-out capabilities to ensure that an account is accessible to only one user at a time. 

4. Leverage multi-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds a complementary layer of security to privileged accounts. By requiring multiple forms of user verification, 2FA makes it harder for attackers to access privileged accounts, even if their credentials are compromised. 

Employ cybersecurity solutions that support 2FA as part of your organization’s identity and access management processes to secure privileged accounts. Syteca offers enterprise-level two-factor authentication that uses employees’ personal devices to check their identities.

5. Adopt just-in-time privileged access management

Implementing just-in-time privileged access management (JIT PAM) can also help you secure privileged accounts and sessions. The key idea of JIT PAM is that a user is granted access to a privileged account only when they need it, for the minimum amount of time required to complete a specific task, and that access is revoked immediately after.

By eliminating prolonged, unnecessary privileged access to critical data and systems, JIT PAM can help you minimize the risk of unauthorized access and privilege misuse. Even if a privileged account is compromised, JIT PAM ensures that the attacker’s window of opportunity is limited to the shortest amount of time possible.

Syteca can help uphold JIT PAM in your organization by delivering temporary credentials to users and enforcing time-based access limits to endpoints.

6. Monitor and record privileged user sessions

By monitoring and recording privileged user sessions, you get a comprehensive view of privileged account activities at your organization’s endpoints. Monitoring privileged account activity helps you identify and respond to suspicious user behavior, thus preventing and mitigating insider threats, compromised account attacks, and other types of malicious activities that may harm your organization.

In turn, recordings of privileged sessions can help you create a reliable audit trail, useful for both cybersecurity needs and compliance efforts. If an incident occurs, session recordings offer detailed insights into what happened, making it easier to analyze the chain of events and pinpoint the root cause.

Syteca’s user activity monitoring (UAM) capabilities allow you to monitor privileged user activity in real time or record sessions in a searchable screen capture format along with insightful metadata. Receive alerts on suspicious events and automatically respond to potential cybersecurity threats. Syteca also lets you generate a variety of user activity reports and export sessions for incident investigation.

Conclusion

PASM empowers you to advance your organizational cybersecurity, prevent threats, protect critical data, and meet compliance requirements by helping you mitigate the risks inherent to privileged accounts and user sessions. The six best practices we gathered can help you implement PASM effectively.

Dedicated solutions can make your PASM efforts more streamlined and productive. Syteca’s powerful PAM and advanced UAM capabilities can simplify the path to secure and efficient management of privileged accounts and sessions.