How to Secure Service Accounts: Protecting Identity Security’s Achilles’ Heel

Semperis argues AI-driven attacks are outpacing identity teams as machine identities outnumber human ones 10:1, and urges building organization-wide cyber resilience around hybrid identity protection before the next crisis.

Syncing Domain Admins into Entra ID lets attackers pivot from compromised on-prem AD to the cloud, and back via password writeback. CIS and Microsoft advise keeping privileged admin accounts cloud-only.

SpecterOps argues identity risk now extends beyond Tier Zero, as attackers increasingly use legitimate credentials and trusted relationships to reach backups, regulated data, and other critical workloads.

IAM is the control plane attackers target: inventory privileged human and machine identities, map their reach, and close the gap—broad, durable permissions that outlive the job that granted them.

This post focuses on obtaining domain administrative privileges from a local administrator or domain user account. Once the initial steps have been taken to obtain local administrative access on a Windows operating system, the natural next steps are to gain domain user and domain administrative privileges.

Semperis introduces Migrator for Active Directory 2.0, an update aimed at helping organizations move Active Directory environments with confidence and greater operational control.