Ephemeral accounts are temporary, high-privilege accounts created for short-term use. They’re a convenient way to get quick, temporary access to systems, data or applications for one-off tasks. Need temporary admin rights for a few minutes? Just create an ephemeral account, complete your task and move on.
But behind the convenience of these temporary credentials loom serious security threats.
What’s the issue with ephemeral accounts?
By design, ephemeral accounts are created on short notice as needed, typically with randomly generated names, elevated privileges and short lifespans. Sounds efficient, right? But when something goes wrong – and in the cybersecurity space, it eventually will – these accounts create huge blind spots for security operations teams.
Because these accounts aren’t tied to a specific person or application, it’s extremely difficult to determine:
- Who created the account?
- What is the purpose of the account?
- What action happened with the account?
- Was the action authorized?
Invisible activity
Since these accounts don't correlate with an actual user in activity logs, incident response becomes a guessing game. If an incident occurs and the logs only show cryptic, temporary account names, the security team will be forced to spend hours digging, and they may never be able to find a clear answer.
Without proper auditing, you may never be able to discover:
- What changes were made to the system or data.
- Who accessed sensitive information.
- If there was any unauthorized access or tampering.
Accounts like “38dkfjrms” tell you nothing. But if accounts follow a clear naming structure (using identifiable markers like abbreviations, prefixes or indicators such as a “–“ or “.”) or better yet, if they're personalized, it becomes way easier to trace activity back to a specific user or application. This level of traceability is critical to incident response teams.
The risk of standing privileges
Standing privileges are another big concern when it comes to ephemeral accounts. Temporary accounts that are granted broad access and, left unchecked, are highly risky. Group memberships and elevated roles that aren’t revoked when they’re no longer needed are an attacker’s dream. These accounts are also an audit nightmare as they tend to cause failed audits and compliance checks.
Revoking privileges that are not permanently required allows your company to reduce its attack surface significantly.
Why just-in-time privilege elevation is a better approach
Just-in-time privilege elevation flips the model. Instead of creating disposable accounts with elevated access, just-in-time privilege elevation allows admins to elevate their privileges only when needed, and only for the duration of the task.
This approach provides:
- Cleaner auditing and logging
- Account names that match the user/application using them
- Account ownership and activity tracking
- Password rotation
- Permissions expiration
- Clear ownership and accountability
With just-in-time privilege elevation, security operations teams know exactly who is using what accounts, and for what purpose. They don’t need to decipher obscure account names or wonder who made a change. It also allows account trackability in audit logs across all systems such as Active Directory (AD) as well as the endpoint the account is using. And if the account is checked out from a privileged access management (PAM) system, the account names will match in all your centralized syslogs.
Just-in-time privilege elevation in action
Let’s look at an example of this concept in use. Old Towne Bank, a fictitious financial institution with 5,000 employees located in northern Kentucky, had a policy in place that allows the creation of ephemeral accounts to satisfy the immediate and short-term needs of their external contractors during end-of-quarter audits. The goal? Limit the number of business license applications needed to support this surge.
However, at the end of the quarter, several privileged ephemeral accounts were created with the intention of being deleted when they were no longer needed. But of course – the IT team got pulled away to address a critical application outage, and the active accounts were forgotten. Time went on, one of the IT team members transitioned from that team, and these ephemeral accounts were never deleted.
Eventually – you guessed it – a threat actor was able to breach one of these accounts in AD. With its standing privileges still intact, they moved laterally through the environment, ultimately accessing sensitive financial data and personally identifiable information (PII).
Time to move on from ephemeral accounts
Ephemeral accounts might feel like a quick fix, but in reality, they create more problems than they solve. Switching to just-in-time privilege elevation with personalized privileged accounts gives you the best of both worlds: the flexibility your team needs and the oversight your security team depends on.
