The Complete Guide to PAM Tools, Features, And Techniques

Privileged access management is one of the most important topics in cybersecurity – yet it can be a minefield to get right. For hackers, elevated permissions are one of the absolute best ways to plan and execute a successful account. In fact, many attacks would simply be impossible without them.

But effective privileged access management (PAM) is about more than just finding and installing the best tools. There are a whole range of techniques and principles it’s important to get your head around, often split across a bewildering range of different products.

To get PAM right, it’s important to know what the most up-to-date techniques are and what products you’ll need to effectively implement them. That’s what we discuss in this blog.

4 Key Principles for Effective Privileged Access Management

Before we can dig into specific PAM tools and techniques – it’s first helpful to discuss what effective privileged access management looks like.

These principles can generally be defined as ‘what you’re trying to achieve’ with PAM. The techniques we discuss later in the blog focus more on the practical ‘how’ of actually implementing them.

1. Reducing Your Attack Surface with Least Privilege

Any business that’s serious about cybersecurity in 2024 needs to think about least privilege. In today’s cloud-based world, there’s no other effective framework or policy that can both reduce the possibility and scope of a potential attack.

Bogdan Dolohan, Head of Technical Support, Heimdal®

This is by far one of the most important principles in cybersecurity. At its core, least privilege is very simple: it simply says that access should only be given to accounts that absolutely need it. Ideally, it should also only be offered when it is needed as well.

In practice, least privilege implementation is much more complex than this, involving many of the techniques and tools we describe later in this blog. But at its heart, it is simply the principle that those who don’t need admin rights shouldn’t have them.

2. Strengthening Your Defenses with Multi-Layer Security

In today’s complex IT environments, there is no single tool or solution that can guarantee your organization’s security. Any account can be hacked, including those with elevated privileges.

Effective security, therefore, needs to involve a whole range of different security tools, techniques, and protections.

Privileged access management can’t exist in a silo, because hackers often rely on network/software vulnerabilities, malware, and phishing techniques to gain access to elevated permissions in the first place.

To get PAM right, you need to understand it in the context of everything a hacker could be trying to access and every technique they’re using to do that.

Check out the webinar below to find out more about the effects of multi-layer security.

3. Implementing Effective Password Security

Strong passwords are one of the oldest principles of cybersecurity. Unfortunately, it remains as much a challenge in 2024 as it did in 2004.

The ideal password from a security point of view looks something like this: “*J$!0At6qFbW”. It should be long, unique, regularly changed, entirely random, and full of special characters. Needless to say, this is almost impossible for the average user to remember.

This is an issue in a world where people have different logins for operating systems, cloud apps, email, software tools – and a whole lot more.

Many of the tools we discuss below aim to reduce this friction. Some of the more traditional tools focus on eliminating issues like obvious and duplicated passwords. More advanced tools aim to avoid the end user needing to remember plain text passwords at all.

Either way, an effective privilege access management strategy isn’t complete without a thorough consideration of how credentials are used, remembered, and secured.

4. Balancing Security with Ease of Use

The easiest way to ensure hackers can’t gain elevated permissions is to remove admin accounts entirely. Unfortunately, no company can operate like this.

Effective security, therefore, is always going to be a balancing act. Better security generally creates more friction for everyday users. And if there is too much friction, there’s a good chance they’ll find insecure workarounds to get done what they need to do.

Luckily, some of the more extended PAM techniques we discuss below aim to reduce the trade-off between security and ease of use as much as possible. Taking advantage of these is key to implementing effective and sustainable PAM protections.

PAM Basics: 5 Common Privileged Access Management Techniques And Tools

Privileged access management tools have been a common feature of the cybersecurity market for some time. By now, there is a common set of tools and features that are offered across most standard platforms.

Generally, these tools can be found in ‘privileged account and session management’ (PASM) products. These are the most common and fundamental options in the PAM market. Here’s what that includes:

1. Session Management

To detect suspicious activity on privileged accounts, you need data about how they are being used. Session management tools allow you to monitor and detect realtime activity on all privileged user and service accounts. Through anomaly analysis, these tools can detect suspicious behavior like lateral movement, malware injection, and more.

This helps identify when hackers have gained privileged access, so you can lock down the accounts before they have the chance to complete their attack.

2. Password Strength And Rotation

These are some of the oldest tools in the PAM arsenal, aiming to improve the strength of passwords across the organization.

Generally, this includes policies to ensure passwords can’t be duplicated, and that they involve a certain number of numbers and special characters. You can also create rules to mandate that passwords are changed regularly, with users being prompted to change passwords upon login.

3. Role-Based Access Controls

Effective identity management is about having a predefined list of roles and privileges, so you know when you hire someone or change roles, it’s clear what privileges they should be assigned. The goal of role-based access is to take away the individual and the person and assign rules based on their identity.

Mikkel Pederson, Head of Global Sales Enablement, Heimdal®

This is the most common way for IT teams to grant and govern access rights. Most organizations have too many user and service accounts to manage individually. Instead, PAM products let you provision rights based on job roles.

This generally involves giving HR teams access to employee data, sales teams access to customer data, and security teams access to IT assets. Done right, this helps ensure privileges are only given to employees who really need them.

4. Privileged Account Audit

Least privilege dictates that you should remove admin rights on all accounts that don’t need them. To do that, you need to first understand what elevated permissions exist in the first place.

Without a PAM tool, this is fiendishly difficult. Luckily, most PASM products allow you to run a scan that can identify all privileged user and service accounts. From there, it’s reasonably easy to remove access rights for all accounts that don’t require them.

5. Multi-Factor Authentication

MFA has become increasingly popular in recent years. It’s one of the best ways to ensure accounts are protected even after hackers have acquired privileged credentials.

The most common form of MFA requires users to either tap a notification or input a code from their smartphone when logging in. This can be used instead of or alongside traditional passwords.

MFA is now commonly offered in individual applications – but a PAM tool is the best way to implement it on a network-wide basis.

4 Advanced PAM Techniques That Take Your Defense to the Next Level

In the last few years, a series of additional tools have evolved to meet the evolving needs of today’s increasingly distributed and cloud-based IT environments.

These are some of the best options available for businesses looking to reduce the trade-off between security and ease of use.

1. Just-in-Time Access

Just-in-time access takes least privilege to the next level. The goal is to ensure privileged accounts only have admin rights when they need them.

Unlike the features in the last section, this technique is generally only available through specialist privileged elevation and delegation management (PEDM) tools. Nonetheless, it’s quickly becoming the gold standard of effective PAM.

When a user requires elevated permissions, they submit a request and provide a reason. Access can then be provided on a case-by-case basis for specific time-limited periods. It can be granted manually by an IT/security team. More often, that team can configure policies to automatically grant or delegate access and specify how long for.

This is important because it means admin accounts can still be locked down even if they’re infiltrated by hackers. The best JIT tools can automatically remove access when specific risk signals are detected, such as malware injection, memory scraping, and more.

Heimdal’s Andrei Hinodache demonstrates exactly how just-in-time access works in this webinar.

2. Cloud Entitlement Management

The standard PASM featureset is generally designed to manage access to files and IT assets. But increasingly, businesses are also relying on cloud-based virtual machines, DevOps environments, databases, and more.

This can be a particular security challenge because developers and admins often require elevated permissions to use these services. At the same time, traditional security products struggle to effectively govern access to cloud and virtualized assets.

Therefore, alternative tools have evolved to manage these cloud environments, generally known as cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM). These involve tools to discover, reconcile, optimize, and manage cloud-based privileged credentials.

3. Password Managers

These record all passwords and save them in a secure vault. Once the user has been verified, the password manager can automatically enter passwords on the user’s behalf, removing the need for plain text passwords to be typed and stored in active memory.

This is effective because it ensures passwords can be strong, unique, and regularly changed without affecting the user experience. Often, the user doesn’t need to even know or be able to see the plain text password to gain access.

At its most extreme, passwords can be rotated near-constantly, meaning no two login attempts are made with the same passwords. This ensures stolen credentials are effectively useless, since the password will likely have changed by the time the hacker logs in.

4. Secure Remote Access

This is designed to provide a more secure remote connection to sensitive assets like servers. The goal is to avoid hackers being able to intercept the connection, exfiltrate data, or insert malware when IT admins connect.

In many ways, this is similar to a virtual private network (VPN) – it’s essentially an encrypted private connection that’s much more difficult to hack. The feature can be enabled through endpoint privilege management tools or specialist remote access products.

Read more: What Is Secure Remote Access?

Putting PAM in Context: Why Privileged Access Can’t Exist in a Silo

At this point, we’ve discussed features and techniques across a wide range of different security tools. This includes:

Privileged accounts and session management (PASM)

Privileged elevation and delegation management (PEDM)

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)

Password managers and credential management tools

Endpoint privilege management

We’ve now conclusively discussed all the techniques and features conventionally covered by privilege access management tools. By now, most cybersecurity providers would consider the topic finished.

But here’s the issue: cyber attacks don’t exist in silos. There are a number of other techniques that hackers use to target privileged credentials. The difference is that these are generally considered another branch of cybersecurity and therefore covered by different tools.

For hackers, however, the distinction is irrelevant. There aren’t PAM attacks, network attacks, or vulnerability attacks. There are only cyber attacks – and whatever techniques and tools are available to successfully execute them.

It’s important, however, to understand the full scope of methods a hacker could be using, so you can effectively protect your business against them. Here are the main points to be aware of:

2. Patching And Vulnerability Management

Hackers often use software vulnerabilities to accumulate extra privileges. But often, patching is considered a separate element of cybersecurity, generally available through siloed endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.

The last thing you want is to invest in the market’s best PAM tools, only for the hacker to bypass your defenses by exploiting an unpatched vulnerability. Keeping on top of software patches is therefore fundamental.

3. Phishing And Email Security

Most of the techniques in this blog are designed to make it more difficult for hackers to move laterally and elevate their privileges. But phishing prevention can also make it much harder for them to access the IT environment in the first place.

Phishing is one of the most common ways for hackers to access your environment. Often, they do this by targeting unprivileged accounts and then gradually working to accumulate extra privileges.

Your PAM strategy is therefore incomplete without an effective phishing defense. Ideally, this should filter suspicious messages out of users’ inboxes entirely.

4. Advanced Threat Hunting

Organizations often invest in a series of threat hunting tools to help detect and respond to realtime attacks and suspicious behavior. This can involve tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), and others.

There are several ways these tools can also help to improve the overall strength of your security posture:

Blocking unsanctioned apps on endpoints: This reduces the number of credentials and systems that the hacker can target. It also ensures the IT team has visibility and control over all accounts and credentials, so there are no unsanctioned back doors for hackers to target.

Blocking specific apps on servers: For servers, it’s helpful to create a blacklist of specific apps that are always blocked. This should include programs like Mimikatz, which are commonly used by hackers for lateral movement techniques like active memory scraping.

Removing FTP connections: It’s also important to remove file transfer protocol (FTP) connections on servers wherever possible. This protocol is considered insecure because it uses unencrypted traffic that can be hijacked. Instead, replace it with a secure protocol like SSH.

Read more: XDR vs. EDR vs. NDR: A Comparison

5. Network Security

Securing network connections is another vital tactic. If privileged users are using insecure connections, a savvy hacker can access sensitive information, active memory, or credentials – without themselves having additional admin rights. This can therefore be a popular way for hackers to both gain admin access (via leaked credentials) and bypass the need for them in the first place.

There are a range of tools on the market designed to help security teams remove insecure connections and network vulnerabilities. These can include intrusion detection or prevention systems, (IDS or IPS), or DNS monitoring tools. These all make it much more difficult for hackers to intercept network connections.

One Platform, One License, One Unified Approach: Heimdal® XDR

To implement all the advice and techniques in this blog, you’re going to need a lot of different cybersecurity tools. Some of these are specialist PAM solutions, others are separate security products that impact your overall PAM strategy.

But here’s the issue: The more siloed tools you have, the weaker your overall PAM strategy becomes. That’s where Heimdal® comes in.

Heimdal® offers the widest security platform on the market, including:

Privileged access management: Including PASM, PEDM, and password management functionality.

Network security: Such as DNS monitoring tools and cloud ransomware protection.

Endpoint security: Through next-gen antivirus, firewalls, and mobile device management.

Vulnerability management: Ensuring a consistent approach to patching software and network-based vulnerabilities.

Email and collaboration security: Reducing initial access points such as phishing, via email security and email fraud prevention.

Threat hunting: A range of EDR and XDR-based tools to help detect and respond to realtime threats.

Unified endpoint management: Such as remote desktop and BitLocker Management tools, designed to help you manage and protect endpoints and servers.

PAM Techniques: FAQs

What are the different types of PAM?

There are a number of PAM tools that are commonly used to help protect privileged accounts. These include privileged account and session management (PASM), privileged elevation and delegation management (PEDM), cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), endpoint privilege management, and credential management tools. The best PAM solutions combine this functionality into a single product.

What are the most important privileged access management principles?

Some of the most important PAM principles involve implementing least privilege, creating a multi-layered security approach, achieving effective password management, and reducing the overall friction between security and ease of use. There are many techniques and tools available to help IT teams achieve these fundamental goals.

Why is PAM so important?

Privileged access management is a vital part of cybersecurity because hackers often require elevated permissions in order to successfully carry out their attack. An effective security strategy should therefore involve a range of techniques to reduce and defend privileged accounts wherever possible.

Cristian is a Content Editor & Creator at Heimdal®, where he developed a deep understanding of the digital threat landscape. His style resonates with both technical and non-technical readers, proof being in his skill of communicating cybersecurity norms effectively, in an easy-to-understand manner.

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