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06/09/2026 9:33 am
TL;DR: Compromised credentials and standing admin rights still drive severe breaches, and CyberFOX argues that PAM reduces that exposure by enforcing least privilege, limiting lateral movement, and preserving audit evidence across privileged sessions. The governance lesson is simple: privileged access is not just an IT convenience issue, it is a core control boundary for ransomware resistance, compliance, and operational containment.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by CyberFOX: Does PAM Improve Cybersecurity?
By the numbers:
- Lack of credential rotation is cited as the top cause of NHI-related attacks by 45% of organisations, followed by inadequate monitoring and logging (37%) and over-privileged accounts (37%).
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when organizations allow persistent admin rights on managed devices?
A: Persistent admin rights expand the blast radius of a compromise.
Q: Why do credentials and privilege matter so much in ransomware incidents?
A: Ransomware operators usually need administrative access to disable security tools, stop services, move laterally, and encrypt at scale.
Q: When does privileged access management fail in practice?
A: It fails when organisations equate password vaulting with governance.
Practitioner guidance
- Remove standing admin rights from routine user accounts Inventory accounts with persistent elevation, then convert recurring admin tasks into time-boxed elevation workflows with explicit expiry and approval.
- Record and review privileged sessions that touch critical systems Enable session logging for commands, file changes, and administrative actions on high-value assets so investigators can reconstruct what happened during elevated access.
- Tie privileged access to task scope and role changes Reassess whether admin rights still match current duties whenever users move roles or teams.
What's in the full article
CyberFOX's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A closer walkthrough of how AutoElevate applies policy-based privilege elevation in day-to-day IT operations
- Operational examples showing how help desk ticket volume changes when elevation requests are automated
- Implementation detail on centralized reporting, which is useful for teams trying to evidence privileged access controls
- The vendor’s perspective on MSP deployment patterns across multiple client environments
👉 Read CyberFOX's analysis of how PAM improves cybersecurity →
Privileged access management and ransomware: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
06/09/2026 9:34 am
PAM is fundamentally a standing privilege problem, not a logging problem. The article correctly stresses audit trails, but the deeper issue is that permanent elevation creates an avoidable attack surface before any monitoring begins. If privileged rights sit in place all the time, the organisation has already accepted excess exposure and is merely observing it later. The practitioner conclusion is that monitoring is necessary, but it cannot compensate for persistent privilege.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 1 in 4 organisations are already investing in dedicated NHI security capabilities, with an additional 60% planning to do so within the next twelve months, 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 with nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should organisations treat PAM as part of IAM governance or as a separate control?
A: PAM should be treated as part of the broader identity governance model, not as a disconnected tool layer. It governs who can gain elevation, for how long, and under what conditions, which makes it tightly linked to IAM, IGA, and lifecycle management. The right operating model ties those controls together instead of managing them in silos.
👉 Read our full editorial: PAM and least privilege: why privileged access still matters
