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11/07/2026 1:59 pm
TL;DR: Hidden administrators and privilege escalation paths create a direct route to sensitive assets, and Soffid argues that real-time identity monitoring, anomaly detection, and automated response are needed to surface them across hybrid, cloud, and remote environments. The real issue is not visibility alone, but the assumption that access remains sufficiently mapped and stable for periodic review.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Soffid: Privilege Escalation: How CISOs Detect Hidden Admins
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams find hidden admin accounts in hybrid environments?
A: Start by reconciling directory groups, cloud roles, ACLs, and delegated permissions to identify identities with administrative capability outside the official admin roster.
Q: Why do hidden administrators increase enterprise breach risk?
A: Hidden administrators increase risk because they give attackers a route to high-value actions without needing obvious escalation indicators.
Q: What do IAM teams get wrong about privilege escalation paths?
A: They often focus on named privileged accounts instead of the chain of permissions that makes privilege reachable.
Practitioner guidance
- Map effective privilege, not just assigned roles Build a living inventory of accounts that can reach administrative actions through ACLs, group nesting, delegated permissions, and dormant entitlements.
- Audit hidden admins across hybrid control planes Compare identity repositories, directory groups, cloud roles, and infrastructure permissions to identify accounts that can administer systems without being listed as official admins.
- Add response playbooks for privilege anomalies Define automatic containment steps for abnormal privilege changes, including account blocking, session restriction, and security-team alerting.
What's in the full article
Soffid's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A runtime monitoring workflow for tracing privilege escalation routes across applications, infrastructure, and directory domains
- Specific examples of how SOFFID ITDR detects hidden administrators through ACL analysis and privileged account logging
- Response actions such as account blocking, temporary restrictions, and alerting when suspicious identity behaviour appears
- Implementation detail on using a centralized management platform to consolidate identity activity across hybrid environments
👉 Read Soffid's analysis of hidden admins and privilege escalation paths →
Hidden admins and privilege escalation paths: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
11/07/2026 2:08 pm
Hidden admin exposure is an identity governance failure before it is a detection problem. When privileged capabilities exist outside the official administrative inventory, the governance model is already incomplete. That means access review, PAM scope, and owner accountability are all operating on partial data. Practitioners should treat hidden admin discovery as a control map correction exercise, not a logging exercise.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared to nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when hidden admin access is discovered?
A: Accountability should sit with the system owner, the identity owner, and the privileged access governance function together. Hidden admin access usually survives because ownership is fragmented across teams and tools. If nobody is responsible for effective privilege, the control gap persists even after it is discovered.
👉 Read our full editorial: Hidden admins and privilege escalation paths expose IAM blind spots
