All news with #privileged access tag

🔒 AI agents are evolving into autonomous enterprise workers that do more than generate content: they read email, access SaaS, call APIs, modify records and execute workflows. This shift introduces insider-like risk because agents can act with high autonomy and broad access. Leaders must move beyond traditional IAM to enforce action-level and runtime controls, assign human owners, and apply lifecycle governance to ensure agents are discovered, monitored, and constrained.

🛈 Microsoft released the KB5120998 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, bringing 35 non-security changes and improvements to the Start menu, taskbar, search, and system behaviors. This optional update lets administrators test bug fixes and new features before they're broadly deployed in the next Patch Tuesday release. It also begins rolling out an administrator protection feature that supplies just-in-time privileges and profile separation, disabled by default and configurable via Intune or Group Policy.

🔒 AWS Lambda functions now support full Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-based policies, enabling platform and security teams to define granular permissions for multiple principals and actions within a single policy. This replaces the previous per-principal permission model and permits the use of the full range of IAM condition keys, such as source IP or principal tag restrictions. Policies can be managed via the Lambda console JSON editor, AWS CLI, SDKs, CloudFormation, and SAM. The feature is available in all AWS commercial Regions at no extra cost.

🔒 AI agents require managed identities and tightly scoped permissions to avoid uncontrolled access and privilege escalation. Treat each agent as a first-class principal with lifecycle-managed identities, explicit owners, and task-based RBAC. Implement controlled tool binding, just-in-time elevation for high-risk actions, and end-to-end audit logging to ensure accountability and rapid incident response. Regular reviews and revocation testing are essential.

🛡️ Existing security controls weren’t built for autonomous AI agents, and static credentials and standing privileges are insufficient. Organizations must define agentic identity, secure agent-to-agent communication, adopt dynamic secrets management, enforce least privilege for delegated workflows, and unify workforce identity. Governance across the identity lifecycle is essential to ensure auditable, revocable, and context-aware access for agents.

🔐 Teleport's 2026 report finds 69% of US infrastructure security leaders say identity management must evolve to address mounting AI risks. Respondents reported tangible AI-related incidents — 35% confirmed and a further 24% suspected — even as AI improved investigation times, documentation quality and engineering output. The report identifies over-privileged AI and reliance on static credentials as primary risk drivers and recommends least-privilege access, reduced use of long-lived secrets, and reorganizing identity teams to include platform and engineering stakeholders.

🔐 Privileged accounts frequently remain active across enterprises, with a reported 91% of end-users operating at their highest privilege. Analysts link this to legacy governance, fragile integrations, and cumbersome PAM tooling that drives users to bypass controls. The growth of non-human identities—service accounts, APIs, CI/CD pipelines—exacerbates the issue because they authenticate programmatically and rarely expire. That standing access raises risks from accidental outages and data exposure to lateral attacker movement and weakened compliance.

🔐 New research from CyberArk finds enterprise users routinely bypass IAM controls to work faster, with 63% of security leaders reporting this behavior. Only 1% of organizations have fully implemented a modern just‑in‑time privileged access model, while 91% say at least half of privileged access remains always‑on. Shadow accounts and unmanaged secrets surface weekly in 54% of firms, and many lack clear AI access policies.

🛡️ Non-human employees — bots, AI agents, service accounts and automation scripts — are expanding enterprise attack surfaces as organizations scale AI and cloud automation. NHIs often live outside traditional IAM and frequently hold over-permissioned standing access and static credentials, making them attractive targets. The article recommends applying zero-trust, enforcing least-privilege and Just-in-Time access, and adopting ephemeral secrets and automated rotation. It highlights secrets and Privileged Access Management solutions such as KeeperPAM to centralize secrets, monitor privileged sessions, and make machine identities auditable and manageable at scale.

🔒 As year-end budgets close, organizations should prioritize security purchases that reduce real business risk and produce measurable outcomes. Skip vendor wish lists; focus on strengthening identity controls — expanding MFA, tightening privileged access, and auditing Active Directory — and on short, outcome-based engagements such as attack-surface reviews, tabletop exercises, and purple-team testing. Consolidate redundant tools, pre-buy continuity capacity, and document KPIs to justify future funding.

🔐 Microsoft Deputy CISO Raji Dani outlines the importance of hardening customer support tools and identities to reduce the risk of lateral movement and data exposure. The post recommends dedicated, isolated support identities protected by Privileged Role MFA and strict device controls. It advocates case-based RBAC with just-in-time and just-enough access, minimizing service-to-service trust, and deploying robust telemetry to speed detection and response. These layered controls apply to in-house teams and third-party providers.

🔒 CrowdStrike announced Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security, a unified solution to protect human, non-human, and AI agent identities across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. It consolidates initial access prevention, modern secure privileged access, identity threat detection and response (ITDR), SaaS identity security, and agentic identity protection into a single sensor and management console. Delivered via the AI-native Falcon platform, the offering provides real-time visibility, dynamic access enforcement, and autonomous response to reduce identity-driven breaches and simplify hybrid identity security.