Your CyberArk deployment protects the privileged accounts it knows about. The problem? It doesn’t know about all of them.
Your privileged identity attack surface is far larger and more complex than you realize. It’s growing exponentially from service accounts auto-generated by cloud platforms, admin accounts created by business units/shadow IT, Kubernetes service accounts proliferating across container clusters, local admin accounts on servers and workstations, API keys and tokens scattered across DevOps pipelines, break-glass accounts created “temporarily” and forgotten, 3rd party/contractor admin access that never gets revoked. I can continue, but you get the point.
Each of these represents a potential entry or elevation point for attackers. Each privileged account is a path to your crown jewels. And if any one of them isn’t protected by CyberArk (or visible to your security team at all), you have a critical blind spot.
Why Traditional Discovery Tools Fall Short
Most organizations attempt privileged account discovery that utilize the following methods:
- Active Directory queries only show what lives in AD, which means local privileged accounts are left out. They can flag obvious privileged groups, but they rarely expose nested entitlements or real privilege escalation paths.
- Point-in-time scans deliver a snapshot, not operational control. When run quarterly or annually, they are far too infrequent for modern cloud and DevOps environments and routinely miss privileged accounts created between scans.
- CyberArk’s built-in discovery is not designed to provide complete visibility into systems outside of Windows/AD into non-standard systems. As a result, high-risk privilege can remain outside the vault even in mature CyberArk programs.
The gap Hydden fills for CyberArk customers is continuous privileged discovery across all critical systems, including on-prem, SaaS, devices, and containers. The accounts that are discovered on these systems are analyzed for hygiene risks and can be automatically added to CyberArk safes or onboarded for governance.
How Hydden Closes CyberArk’s Visibility Gaps
CyberArk can only protect what it knows about. So Hydden acts as CyberArk’s identity data layer, continuously discovering accounts across your entire infrastructure, enriching them with classification and risk context, and automatically onboarding them for vaulting and governance. These are 3 major use cases that CyberArk customers are using today to start measurably reducing risk:
- Continuous, Automated Discovery Across All Infrastructure
Traditional Active Directory discoveries miss privileged accounts that are local to critical systems. Hydden connects across your entire IT ecosystem to continuously discover these accounts, creating a unified, real-time inventory of every privileged account in your hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Once discovered, accounts are automatically brought under CyberArk’s management and secured in Safes. - Intelligent Classification & Risk Scoring
Discovering all privileged accounts is just the start. Hydden applies intelligent classification and risk scoring:- Account Classification: Hydden classifies every identity so teams can quickly understand what they are looking at and what action is required. Accounts are categorized by type (human, service account, or machine identity), by access mode (interactive console/SSH versus programmatic API access), by privilege level (super admin, admin, elevated user, or standard with occasional escalation), and by lifecycle state (active, dormant, stale, or orphaned).
- Risk Scoring: From there, Hydden assigns a risk score from 0 to 100 based on the factors that actually drive exposure. The score is calculated based on what the account can do (entitlements, group membership, extended user/group attributes), what the account can reach (critical systems), how it behaves (active, dormant), how well it is protected (MFA, rotation), and how exposed it is (part of a known breach).
- Onboarding Apps for Complete and Accurate Governance
Hydden’s Universal Collector automatically onboards non-standard, legacy, and custom systems into identity governance platforms, like CyberArk’s Modern IGA. We then normalize identity data, perform continuous parity checks to ensure completeness and accuracy, and enrich accounts with ownership and hygiene context. This guarantees every account across your infrastructure is included in access reviews with the contextual information needed for fast, informed decisions.
You can’t protect what CyberArk can’t see. Don’t leave your organization vulnerable to privileged account compromise because of visibility blind spots. With Hydden + CyberArk, you’ll achieve visibility over your privileged identity attack surface, across on-prem, multi-cloud, edge devices, containers, and beyond. Discover privileged accounts wherever they are, assess their risk, and ensure they are protected by CyberArk.
See Hydden + CyberArk in Action: hydden.com/book-demo
