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06/09/2026 9:33 am
TL;DR: Privileged access management is framed here as the practical control layer for reducing admin account abuse, local admin sprawl, and delayed breach containment across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments, according to CyberFOX. The editorial point is that standing privilege, not lack of tooling alone, is what keeps lateral movement and remediation costs high.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by CyberFOX: Privileged Access Management (PAM): How Organizations Secure And Control Privileged Accounts
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
- When AWS credentials are exposed publicly, attackers attempt access within an average of 17 minutes and as quickly as 9 minutes in some cases.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when standing admin rights are still allowed in PAM programmes?
A: Standing admin rights break the core PAM assumption that elevation should exist only for a specific task and then disappear.
Q: Why do privileged service accounts need the same lifecycle controls as human admins?
A: Privileged service accounts can carry the same or greater blast radius than employee accounts, but they are often reviewed less often.
Q: When should teams prioritise zero standing privilege over broader access convenience?
A: Prioritise zero standing privilege whenever access supports production systems, external collaboration, or time-sensitive cloud operations.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every standing privileged path Inventory admin accounts, local admin rights, service accounts, and cloud roles, then identify where access persists after the task ends.
- Remove persistent elevation where it is not justified Replace always-on privilege with time-bound elevation or no elevation at all for accounts that do not require continuous admin reach.
- Extend lifecycle governance to privileged non-human identities Apply provisioning, review, and offboarding controls to service accounts and cloud roles so stale elevation cannot survive role changes.
What's in the full article
CyberFOX's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step explanation of its PAM deployment approach for lean IT teams and endpoint-heavy environments.
- Operational description of how privileged activity logging and audit evidence are captured for compliance workflows.
- Specific guidance on policy-based elevation, JIT access, and ZSP-style controls as they apply in day-to-day administration.
- Practical deployment framing for cloud, on-prem, and hybrid access paths that need consistent control.
👉 Read CyberFOX's PAM guidance on controlling privileged accounts →
Privileged access management and standing admin rights: what is failing?
Explore further
06/09/2026 9:34 am
Standing privilege is the control failure PAM was built to remove. The article correctly identifies that most breaches begin when an attacker gets administrative access, not when they defeat a complex exploit chain. That means the real problem is persistent elevation that survives long enough to be abused. Practitioners should treat standing admin rights as a governance defect, not just an endpoint hygiene issue.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can security teams tell whether privileged access reviews are actually working?
A: They are working when every privileged entitlement is inventoried, every decision is traceable, and revoked access is removed from all connected systems without delay. If the organisation can only show approvals but not downstream revocation, the review is administrative recordkeeping rather than governance. Proof of removal is the best maturity signal.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged access management still fails where standing admin rights persist
