One of the main objectives of the bad guys is to escalate to privileged account access wherever possible. The more unfettered access they can gain to administrative, superuser and infrastructure accounts, the freer rein they have to tap into sensitive data stores, tamper with critical systems, quietly gain carte blanche to do whatever they’d care to with a victim organization’s IT infrastructure and to do it all without being detected.
As a result, organizations recognize that they need to take special care with the way that they manage and grant access to the most powerful privileged accounts in their environments. This is accomplished with privileged access management (PAM) tooling. PAM is used to manage privileged credentials, delegate access to them, track privileged sessions to monitor for abuse and report on usage patterns for both the risk team and auditors and generally control the elevation of commands.