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08/07/2026 6:51 pm
TL;DR: Breaches often begin with compromised administrative access and then expand through lateral movement and privilege escalation, reinforcing why privileged access controls remain central to security operations, according to CyberFOX. The useful insight is not that PAM is new, but that standing admin access still creates the blast radius that most programmes underestimate.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by CyberFOX: Privileged Access Management (PAM): How IT Teams Reduce Credential Risk and Maintain Control
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce the risk from standing privileged access?
A: Start by separating privileged roles by function, environment, and identity type so one credential cannot reach everything.
Q: Why do privileged accounts increase lateral movement risk?
A: Privileged accounts are dangerous because they let an attacker reuse one valid credential to reach many systems through normal administrative paths.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about PAM and credential risk?
A: They often treat PAM as a vaulting problem instead of a governance problem.
Practitioner guidance
- Map standing privilege by identity class Inventory human admins, service accounts, and shared operational accounts separately, then document where elevated rights persist without a current business purpose.
- Shorten the lifetime of elevated access Replace permanent admin grants with task-bound elevation wherever operationally possible, and require explicit recertification for exceptions.
- Separate administrative functions by trust zone Stop using the same privileged identity across production, support, backup, and identity-admin functions.
What's in the full article
CyberFOX's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Privilege-management features and workflow examples for controlling administrative accounts across IT environments
- Operational guidance on reducing credential risk through PAM processes rather than only secret rotation
- Product-specific descriptions of password management, privileged access management, and DNS filtering capabilities
- The vendor’s own framing of how MSP and IT teams can operationalise these controls in practice
👉 Read CyberFOX’s blog on privileged access management and credential risk →
Privileged access management and credential risk in the PAM gap?
Explore further
08/07/2026 7:12 pm
Standing privilege is the control assumption this topic exposes. CyberFOX’s framing is directionally correct because privileged access only looks manageable when elevated credentials are assumed to be rare, tightly owned, and short-lived. In real environments, admin authority tends to persist far longer than the task that justified it. The practitioner conclusion is that privileged access must be governed as a lifecycle problem, not just a vaulting problem.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret is 27 days, despite 75% of organisations expressing strong confidence in their secrets management capabilities, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a significant developer behaviour gap, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for privileged access when a breach occurs?
A: Accountability should sit with the business owner of the privileged role, the system owner of the target environment, and the identity team that governs issuance and revocation. That shared accountability is what prevents admin access from becoming nobody’s problem until after the incident.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged access management and credential risk in CyberFOX’s PAM post
