Insider Threats & External Attacks: The Hidden Risks of Standing Privileges in Cloud IAM

Read full article from CyberArk here: https://www.cyberark.com/resources/devsecops/how-external-attackers-and-malicious-insiders-exploit-standing-privileges-in-the-cloud/?utm_source=nhimg.org

In today’s multi-cloud world, most breaches don’t begin with elite hackers or zero-day exploits—they start with standing privileges that were never revoked. These are long-lived, static access rights left behind after temporary tasks or maintenance sessions, and they’ve quietly become one of the most dangerous and overlooked weaknesses in cloud environments.

From abandoned admin tokens to forgotten API keys, standing privileges give both external attackers and malicious insiders the opportunity to access critical systems without tripping traditional defenses. What starts as convenience for developers or admins can quickly turn into a persistent backdoor for adversaries.

Standing Privileges: The Hidden Gateway to Cloud Compromise

Imagine a DevOps engineer hardcoding cloud credentials into a CI/CD pipeline to push a fix before a deadline. The task completes—but those credentials remain, stored in the repository indefinitely.

Weeks later, a compromised endpoint or cloned repo exposes those credentials to an attacker, who uses them to access the organization’s cloud infrastructure. No brute force needed, no alarms triggered—just a static credential reused beyond its lifespan.

This is how credential harvesting, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration often unfold in real-world breaches. Static credentials are essentially keys that never expire, and attackers know it. In fact, many headline breaches—including high-profile cloud incidents across AWS, Azure, and GCP—stem from a single long-lived token or neglected access role.

Insider Threats: Authorized Access, Weaponized

The risk doesn’t stop at external adversaries. Insiders—whether disgruntled employees, contractors, or privileged users—can leverage legitimate standing privileges to cause deliberate damage or exfiltrate data without raising suspicion.

Because these users already have authorized access, their malicious actions often blend into normal operational behavior. For example, a storage administrator can quietly modify retention policies to delete sensitive backups or customer data days or weeks after leaving the company.

Traditional monitoring systems rarely detect such threats because everything appears valid—the credentials, the permissions, and the access patterns. The result?
Silent sabotage, delayed detection, and irreversible loss.

Why Legacy Cloud Security Tools Fail

Most legacy cloud security tools were built for static infrastructures—not for today’s dynamic, identity-driven cloud ecosystems. They focus on perimeter defense, static entitlements, and manual reviews, but they can’t effectively monitor time-sensitive access patterns or ephemeral workloads.

In fast-moving DevOps environments, it’s simply unrealistic to manually grant and revoke privileges in real time. The result is access sprawl: credentials, tokens, and roles piling up across accounts, environments, and platforms.

Attackers exploit this chaos. Insiders hide within it.

Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP): The Modern Defense Model

The solution isn’t more controls—it’s smarter ones. Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) eliminates the concept of permanent access altogether. Instead of granting indefinite credentials, it enforces Just-in-Time (JIT), time-bound, and policy-driven access that disappears automatically once the session ends.

ZSP focuses on the three pillars of access control—Time, Entitlements, and Approvals (TEA):

• Time – Access expires automatically, reducing the attack window.
• Entitlements – Permissions are tightly scoped to specific tasks.
• Approvals – Sensitive actions require explicit authorization, even within familiar workflows like Slack or Teams.

When implemented effectively, ZSP dramatically reduces both external and insider risks:

• Attackers can’t reuse stolen credentials because tokens expire within minutes.
• Insiders lose their persistent backdoors since privileges vanish post-task.
• Compliance improves thanks to auditable, automated access trails.
• Security teams gain visibility and control without slowing development velocity.

Real-World Impact: From Breach Prevention to Operational Efficiency

Organizations adopting ZSP models report not only fewer security incidents, but also faster response times and smoother audits. Automated privilege orchestration across multi-cloud environments cuts manual effort and human error—while enabling developers and administrators to use their preferred CLI and cloud consoles without extra friction.

This is the principle behind modern identity-first security: access when needed, gone when not.

Conclusion: The End of Standing Privileges

Cloud breaches often don’t start with malicious brilliance—they start with forgotten access. Every unused key, every static token, and every unrevoked admin role is an open invitation for compromise.

By moving from standing privileges to Zero Standing Privileges, organizations can shift from a reactive to a proactive security posture—protecting against both external intrusions and insider abuse.

In short, it’s time to retire permanent access and replace it with ephemeral, just-in-time trust—because in the cloud, standing privileges should no longer stand.