Beyond Buzzwords: The Hidden Dangers of Ephemeral Accounts in Cybersecurity
Sept 08, 2025
What are Ephemeral Accounts? Corporate audits today, for cyber security insurance or compliance, focus on group memberships to identify who has access to what. This process identifies who is a Domain Admin, Enterprise Admin, Local Administrator, Database Global Admin, Global Admin in Azure, and Root Access in AWS. Accounts with this level of access likely have static privilege. I like to call these accounts game-over accounts. If these accounts are compromised, the company will have a massive issue on its hands. Other account types lurking in your environment can cause this level of damage. Many DevOps accounts and API keys can also cause this level of damage if compromised. DevOps accounts sometimes fall under the radar outside of the scope of compliance and cybersecurity insurance. The new Privileged Access Management buzzword among vendors, analysts, and operations teams is Ephemeral Accounts . A common phrase I tend to hear is that we don't have static privileged acc...
