Ephemeral Accounts
In the context of cybersecurity, ephemeral accounts are temporary user identities or credentials created for a specific, authorized purpose and a limited duration. The term "ephemeral" literally means "lasting for a very short time," which is the core principle behind this security approach. Once the defined task is completed or the time limit expires, the account is automatically deactivated, deleted, or rendered useless.
Ephemeral accounts are a key component of modern security models like Just-in-Time (JIT) access and the Principle of Least Privilege. They are in direct contrast to traditional, long-lived "standing privileges" where a user has continuous access to a system, even when they aren't actively using it.
Key Characteristics
Temporary Nature: Ephemeral accounts are designed to exist for a very short period, ranging from minutes to hours, depending on the task.
Just-in-Time (JIT) Provisioning: They are created only when a user or system needs them. This means no account exists until a specific, auditable request is made.
Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP): These accounts are provisioned with only the minimum necessary permissions to complete the specific task. They do not have broad or excessive access rights.
Automatic Revocation: The account and its associated credentials are automatically removed or disabled once the task is done or the time limit is reached, eliminating the risk of lingering access.
Benefits in Cybersecurity
The use of ephemeral accounts significantly enhances an organization's security posture by directly addressing common vulnerabilities.
Reduced Attack Surface: Since the accounts are short-lived, the window of opportunity for an attacker to compromise and use them is drastically reduced. An attacker has to be in the right place at the right time.
Mitigation of Insider Threats: Ephemeral accounts limit the potential for malicious insiders or compromised users to misuse privileges over an extended period. Because access is temporary and scoped, there is less opportunity for unauthorized activity.
Enhanced Auditability: The creation, use, and termination of ephemeral accounts are typically logged in detail. This provides a clear, traceable audit trail for security teams, making it easier to investigate any suspicious activity or a breach.
Improved Compliance: Many regulatory frameworks and standards, such as GDPR and HIPAA, require strict access controls. Ephemeral accounts help organizations meet these requirements by enforcing the Principles of Least Privilege and Just-in-Time access.
Common Use Cases
Ephemeral accounts are handy in environments with a large number of temporary users or automated processes.
Third-Party Contractors and Vendors: Granting a contractor a temporary account with specific access to a project for a set number of hours or days, after which the account is automatically removed.
Emergency ("Break Glass") Access: In an emergency, a system administrator can be granted a highly privileged, temporary account to perform a critical task. This prevents them from having permanent, high-level access that could be compromised.
DevOps and Cloud Environments: Automated scripts and pipelines can be given temporary, restricted accounts to deploy code or manage resources in a cloud environment. This prevents a compromised script from having persistent access to the entire infrastructure.
ThreatNG helps manage the risks associated with ephemeral accounts, which are temporary user identities used for specific, limited tasks. These accounts are a significant attack vector because they are non-human identities, like API keys and service accounts, and can be mismanaged, making them prime targets for adversaries.
How ThreatNG Helps with Ephemeral Accounts
ThreatNG provides a comprehensive, outside-in view of an organization's digital footprint, which helps to identify and mitigate risks related to ephemeral accounts. It focuses on how an attacker would perceive and exploit these accounts, rather than relying on internal tools that might miss them. ThreatNG's Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure score is a key feature that identifies and assesses an organization's vulnerability to risks from non-human identities.
External Discovery
ThreatNG performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery to find publicly exposed digital assets without needing internal credentials. This is crucial for ephemeral accounts because it can uncover forgotten or unknown assets, such as a developer's unmonitored test environment containing hardcoded credentials. It discovers a wide range of assets, including subdomains, APIs, exposed development environments, and cloud services.
Example: ThreatNG's discovery process might find an email address like admin-access@example.com on a publicly exposed subdomain, which could be an ephemeral account used for specific administrative tasks.
External Assessment
Once discovered, ThreatNG's external assessment capabilities transform raw data into a clear view of an organization's identity-related risks. The NHI Exposure score is based on several key investigation areas, including identifying DNS vendors, the technology stack, and exposed SaaS applications to map out an organization's digital footprint. It also considers compromised non-human identities and secrets by analyzing sensitive code exposure in repositories and mobile apps.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This assessment module scours public code repositories to find sensitive data like exposed credentials and API keys. For example, it could find a hardcoded API token in a public GitHub repository, which could be an ephemeral credential.
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates how exposed an organization's mobile apps are by discovering them in marketplaces and analyzing their contents for credentials and other sensitive data. An example is finding a hardcoded API key or user account in a mobile app, which directly exposes a non-human identity to an attacker.
Data Leak Susceptibility: The Data Leak Susceptibility score is derived from external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including Dark Web Presence and Domain Intelligence. An exposed ephemeral account found on the dark web would be a critical part of this assessment.
NHI Email Exposure: This specific feature groups emails discovered as "admin," "devops," or "svc". It provides a focused view of email addresses associated with non-human roles and functions, highlighting high-value targets for attackers.
Reporting and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG provides various reports to effectively communicate findings. The Prioritized Report is beneficial, as it categorizes risks into high, medium, low, and informational levels, helping security teams focus on the most critical exposures, such as a compromised administrator's email account. This is crucial for ephemeral accounts, as a highly privileged but temporary credential that has been exposed would be flagged as high-risk.
Continuous Monitoring is essential for ephemeral accounts because they are temporary and can be created or exposed at any time. ThreatNG continuously monitors an organization's external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings, ensuring that newly exposed accounts or credentials are detected promptly. This helps to close the gap between when a credential is leaked and when an organization is alerted, enabling a timely response.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG's investigation modules provide detailed insights to help security teams investigate and remediate risks associated with ephemeral accounts.
Domain Intelligence: This module identifies email security weaknesses, such as the absence of DMARC, SPF, or DKIM records, which increases the susceptibility of non-human email accounts to phishing and spoofing attacks. It also covers certificates, subdomain headers, and sensitive ports, which are parameters that can be tied to ephemeral accounts to determine cyber risk exposure.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module identifies public code repositories and their exposure levels, examining their contents for the presence of sensitive data. It can uncover a variety of sensitive data, including API keys, cloud credentials such as AWS Access Key IDs, and security credentials like PGP private keys or SSH private keys that an attacker could use to compromise a non-human identity.
Archived Web Pages: ThreatNG can discover emails or other sensitive data that were previously exposed on older, archived versions of a website, helping to uncover legacy accounts that may have been forgotten but are still active.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module helps to identify identity data that a search engine may have indexed. ThreatNG can uncover exposed user data, privileged folders, or public passwords that have been inadvertently made available.
Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG's intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache, provide continuously updated threat intelligence that is essential for identifying compromised ephemeral accounts.
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): This repository is a continuously updated list of leaked credentials that ThreatNG uses to assess an organization's risk. If an ephemeral account's credentials are found here, it's a critical indicator of a potential account takeover.
Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability): This repository includes information from NVD, EPSS, KEV, and verified Proof-of-Concept exploits. This helps prioritize remediation efforts on vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited. For example, if a vulnerability is tied to a service that uses an ephemeral account, this repository provides the context needed to prioritize fixing it.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external intelligence can be even more powerful when used with other security solutions.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solutions: When ThreatNG discovers a compromised ephemeral email account on the dark web or in a public repository, it could trigger a policy in an IAM platform. This could automatically force a password reset and require multi-factor authentication for that account, creating a synergy where external intelligence drives automated, proactive changes in internal security controls.
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: A SOAR platform could ingest an alert from ThreatNG about a newly discovered ephemeral account credential in a public repository and automatically execute a playbook. This could involve creating an incident ticket, notifying the IT team, and initiating a workflow to investigate and remediate the exposed credential without human intervention.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems: A SIEM can ingest high-priority alerts from ThreatNG regarding an exposed ephemeral account. The SIEM can then correlate this external finding with internal log data to determine if there has been any suspicious login activity or lateral movement from that specific account, giving analysts a holistic view of the threat.
