PAM and AWS: Keeping pace with AWS privileged accounts (2024)

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PAM and AWS: Keeping pace with AWS privileged accounts (1)

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Chris Smith

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives IT and development teams tools to move fast and change direction on a dime. Privileged accounts for AWS resources are created quickly and maybe abandoned just as quickly. With such a fluid process, it’s difficult for security teams to stay on top of how many privileged accounts have access to AWS, make sure they’re set up properly, and remove them when they’re no longer needed.

PAM oversight is especially important to secure systems like AWS, which are easily misconfigured, inviting attacks.

AWS misconfigurations are rampant

Analyzing billions of anonymized cloud events, McAfee found organizations typically have at least 14 misconfigured IaaS instances running at any given time, resulting in an average of 2,269 misconfiguration incidents per month. These can be as simple as forgetting to check a box during setup.

The most common misconfigurations include:

· Unrestricted access
· Lack of inbound and outbound data encryption
· Failure to turn on Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

On top of these issues, 5.5% of all AWS S3 buckets are misconfigured. Most organizations have at least one AWS S3 bucket set with “open write” permissions, giving anyone and everyone access to inject data into cloud environments, including malicious code that could modify records.

Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, recently announced public access settings for S3 buckets to help AWS customers prevent data breaches caused by incorrect S3 security settings.

That’s great news. But we don’t think it’s enough to protect highly privileged accounts like AWS.

Essential PAM controls for AWS

PAM solutions are designed to enforce consistent PAM best practices every time a new AWS account is set up, whether that’s by the security team, the infrastructure team, or a single developer building an application.

When you set up compute resources with AWS there are several actions you can take to reduce risk:

• Secure AWS privileged credentials in a PAM vault
• Automate high-speed secret creation, archiving, retrieval and rotation
• Limit access to the AWS control panel
• Confirm MFA is required for root access to AWS
• Set up session monitoring and recording for root account activity
• Add in workflow rules for approval or dual control

Additionally, to match the fluid nature of these accounts, continuous AWS account discovery is an essential cloud security control PAM teams need in their arsenal. It gives you the visibility to check that best practices are being followed.

What about native IAM/PAM capabilities offered by AWS?

AWS does offer capabilities to manage identities and privileges. For some organizations, these controls are enough to get up and running. Certainly, they are better than no PAM at all. These controls are stretched when addressing the more advanced requirements of PAM, especially in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

As a PAM leader, your goal is to empower your entire company to follow consistent PAM policies, whether they’re using AWS, Azure, SaaS, or on-premise solutions. When you set up session management rules or run reports for compliance, you’ll want to see all privileged account usage in a single, consolidated view. It’s more efficient to manage AWS credentials from your central PAM solution, rather than implement a special purpose tool that only works on one IaaS platform.

Thinking about how to secure your AWS environment?

You can read more about how PAM solves AWS and other cloud security challenges in the whitepaper:
Critical Controls for Modern Cloud Security.

PAM and AWS: Keeping pace with AWS privileged accounts (2)

PAM in the Cloud. Powerful. Secure.

Try the only feature-complete, enterprise-class CLOUD PAM solution in the world.

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PAM and AWS: Keeping pace with AWS privileged accounts (2024)

FAQs

What are the benefits of privileged access management Pam? ›

Benefits of a PAM solution include mitigating security risks, reducing operational costs and complexity, enhancing visibility and situational awareness across your organization, and improving your regulatory compliance.

What is the difference between privileged access management pam and pim? ›

PAM emphasizes monitoring and auditing privileged user sessions, PIM emphasizes enforcing least privilege and access controls for privileged identities, and PUM emphasizes managing and documenting privileged user access through approval workflows.

What is the Pam solution in AWS? ›

Overview. miniOrange's Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution offers comprehensive identity security for privileged credentials and identities, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.

What is the difference between IAM and Pam? ›

Identity and access management (IAM) is a system to identify and authorize users across an organization. Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a subset of IAM that focuses on privileged accounts and systems.

What are the risks of privileged account management? ›

It's imperative to address every vulnerability and consider all privileged access risks when developing your organizational strategy.
  • Default passwords. ...
  • Stagnant credentials. ...
  • Shared credentials. ...
  • Misuse of credentials. ...
  • Stolen credentials. ...
  • You might also be interested in:
Mar 8, 2024

What is the Pam strategy? ›

PAM refers to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy – comprising people, processes and technology – to control, monitor, secure and audit all human and non-human privileged identities and activities across an enterprise IT environment.

Who needs privileged access management? ›

PAM is necessary to help organizations meet cybersecurity best practices, compliance requirements, and expectations of cyber insurance companies.

Is PIM a part of PAM? ›

PIM and PAM are interrelated terms used in the Privileged Management space, but both have fundamentally different roles to play in securing the Privileged resources of any organization.

What is the policy of a privileged account? ›

Individuals with privileged accounts should not use their account for unauthorized viewing, modification, copying, or destruction of system or user data. Individuals with privileged accounts have a responsibility to protect the confidentiality of any information they encounter while performing their duties.

What is the difference between identity governance and PAM? ›

IGA automates the creation, management, and certification of user accounts, roles, and access rights for individual users in an organization. PAM primarily defines and controls access for privileged users.

What is the difference between IAM and PAM and dam? ›

While IAM is mainly focused on the user's identity and access to resources, PAM is mainly focused on controlling and monitoring access to privileged accounts, including administrator, root, and service accounts. Dynamic Access Management (DAM) sits in between IAM and PAM.

Is PAM a subset of IAM? ›

Privileged access management (PAM) is a subset of IAM that focuses exclusively on protecting privileged accounts—accounts granted to a small number of users who need access to backend systems, databases, and other places where highly-sensitive information is stored.

What is the difference between PAM solution and password manager? ›

Password management tools place the burden on individual users to change passwords regularly and make sure all associated systems and users are kept up to date. PAM solutions, on the other hand, allow for centralized, simultaneous password changing, or rotation.

What is the difference between privileged identity management and privileged access management? ›

PIM centers on the access a user possesses, focusing on identity and access and detailing pre-existing permissions. PAM, conversely, emphasizes managing and monitoring access as users seek it. In essence, while PIM delineates granted permissions, PAM handles on-the-fly access requests to resources.

What are the advantages of Pam method? ›

Advantages of PAM

It can generate the pulse signals and carry the message at the same time, which increases its efficiency and transmission power. The efficiency of PAM is highest among all the types of pulse modulation. The signals of PAM are sampled at regular intervals.

Which of the following are benefits of Pam? ›

PAM allows you to manage passwords using one secure vault which is encrypted and safe enough to prevent cyber attacks.
  • Manage and restrict your ex-employee's access to the organization's resources to prevent cyber threats by closing backdoors.
  • Channelize accesses from a single spot (Single Sign-on)

What are the benefits of Arcon Pam? ›

ARCON PAM offers a wide range of capabilities, including just-in-time access, adaptive authentication, context-aware controls, remote access, secrets management, and extensive integration for DevOps use cases.

What is privileged access management Pam in Salesforce? ›

Privileged access management (PAM) is the set of cybersecurity strategies and technologies that organizations use to control levels of access and permissions for users, accounts, processes, and systems.

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