Local accounts are often excluded from existing lifecycle management policies because they can be easily created by an endpoint’s administrator. This leaves behind unmanaged accounts that can be used to access other critical systems in search of more privileged identities.
Manage Local
Accounts
Problem
Collecting and monitoring local accounts on every workstation and endpoint is difficult to do efficiently, leaving organizations with blind spots in the IGA, PAM, and ITDR implementations.
Risk
Local accounts with privileged access on workstations and endpoints are often utilized to execute malicious activity locally, where other privileged credentials can then be used to move laterally onto critical servers.
Solution
Incorporate a solution that scales to collect identities across any number of workstations to guarantee all local accounts are monitored.
Challenges Detecting and Managing Local Accounts
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As part of a defense in depth strategy, managing local accounts represents critical yet complex challenge in enterprise cybersecurity, where endpoints have become increasingly diverse, distributed, and dynamic. The fundamental difficulty lies in the inherent complexity of discovering, tracking, and controlling local administrative and standard user accounts across heterogeneous environments, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and various specialized systems. Organizations must continuously navigate local account proliferation, shadow IT, legacy systems, and decentralized endpoint management, all while maintaining precise visibility into potentially thousands of devices with unique configurations and rapidly changing user access patterns. Strategies to successfully overcome the challenges of discovering and managing local endpoint identities include:
- Comprehensive Discovery Capabilities: Implement advanced endpoint discovery technologies that utilize multi-vector scanning techniques, leveraging network and agent-based discovery mechanisms to map local accounts across every system.
- Automated Local Account Governance: Deploy sophisticated identity lifecycle management platforms that automatically detect, classify, and reconcile local accounts, implementing intelligent policy enforcement and remediation workflows that minimize manual intervention.
- Cross-Platform Normalization: Develop unified identity management strategies that transcend platform-specific limitations, creating normalized discovery and management framework layers capable of consistently identifying and controlling local accounts across heterogeneous environments.
- Privileged Access Control: Implement dynamic local account management solutions that leverage just-in-time privilege elevation, comprehensive auditing, and behavioral analytics to precisely control and monitor local administrative access.
- Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Establish persistent local account governance frameworks that automatically detect policy violations, generate real-time compliance insights, and proactively remediate potential security risks associated with unmanaged local accounts.
Detect and manage local accounts on any type endpoint
Detect Accounts that Bypassed Policies
Proactively surface ungoverned local users that are not managed by IAM, PAM, ITDR and IGA systems before they can be used to breach your systems and automatically take action to include the missing user in existing applicable policies.
Continuous Account Monitoring
Continuously detect new local accounts and their access right changes so they cannot be maliciously utilized to execute privileged actions.
Local Account Hygiene and Posture Management
Eliminate poor security posture of local accounts by detecting stale passwords, compromised credentials, identities not enrolled in MFA, high failed login attempts and many other indicators or risk in near real-time.
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