In today's rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, service accounts have emerged as a pressing concern for identity and security stakeholders. These machine-to-machine accounts have proven to be a double-edged sword, as adversaries increasingly use them for lateral movement, particularly in the realm of ransomware attacks. The inherent lack of visibility, coupled with their elevated access privileges and exemption from identity protection measures like Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), renders service accounts a perilous blind spot—a veritable goldmine for attackers.

This eBook examines the factors that make protecting service accounts a hard task and assesses the existing approaches to mitigate this risk and their limitations. We then explore the new approach of Unified Identity Protection, which addresses this challenge by automating service account discovery, monitoring, and protection, providing true coverage to this exposed attack surface for the first time.

Service Accounts are a security challenge that must be resolved