The Dangers of Using Service Accounts in the Cloud

Service accounts are powerful access credentials that, once compromised, allow attackers to easily move around networks and gain access to sensitive data. Unfortunately, organizations often struggle with safeguarding service accounts and protecting them effectively.

Users may access service accounts by altering the allow policies for a group or custom role, leading to privilege escalation.

Account Compromise

A compromised service account can provide unwary users with access to sensitive data or assets, expose critical infrastructure, and cause significant business disruptions. These risks increase when one account can be used to impersonate human identity; for instance, if an application's code doesn't properly verify, or an incorrect resource like a database is granted permission by mistake.

Sloppy record-keeping and password hygiene make it hard to identify service accounts and monitor activity, leading to failure to rotate secrets on time and implement an efficient password rotation strategy that doesn't interfere with business operations. Less than 40% of organizations employ multifactor authentication (MFA) for privileged account passwords while one out of every three allow password sharing among staff members.

Service accounts become even more dangerous when attached to compute resources like virtual machine instances or cloud-run applications, where authentication mechanisms such as metadata server authentication, shell access or GitHub repository access exist for these privileged accounts. When attached to these resources, their risk increases dramatically since attackers could use this access to move around their environment more freely and take actions otherwise impossible for them.

As service accounts become more widely utilized, their access can become subject to various groups that grant permission and create blind spots in security measures. If, for instance, an account with Editor access on multiple projects can impersonate other identities and perform administrative duties elsewhere such as Microsoft 365, Amazon Web Services, Google Workspaces and other cloud providers.

An effective security posture for service accounts includes ensuring they only possess the privileges required for their respective functions and no more. Reusing them, when possible, should also be limited; examples include using end-user credentials instead of service accounts when working with APIs, or managing private/public keys on servers instead of leaving Google handle them (Google-managed keys) or leaving it up to users (user-managed keys), to reduce risks that a compromised service account might take action in other environments.

Low Visibility to Activity

Effective threat and anomaly detection systems require visibility across networks and systems - without sufficient visibility, identifying breaches or attacks becomes extremely challenging.

Service accounts can cause detection systems to lose visibility into their environments. They're an especially troublesome source of blind spots in security stacks and often used by attackers to bypass access control restrictions - this being particularly troublesome given that most organizations lack comprehensive mechanisms for discovering, cataloging and managing such accounts.

Organizations may grant service accounts access to more privileges than necessary yet are reluctant to reduce them for fear of breaking applications and processes that rely on them. It's also common practice for default passwords for service accounts to be used which allows cyber criminals to easily identify and exploit these weak configurations.

These accounts may also be shared among multiple applications, making it harder to track activity associated with any one account. Even with Cloud Audit Logs showing which service account made changes or accessed data, tracing back is difficult; you need the specific IDs associated with those applications to do this successfully.

IT and DevOps teams often resort to creating service accounts without first considering any security implications, in order to expedite application development faster. Unfortunately, this practice poses many security risks over time.

Thus, many organizations experience severe gaps in service account lifecycle management best practices such as provisioning, onboarding, session auditing, de-provisioning and enforcement of other security standards. Furthermore, most organizations struggle to keep up with the constant change of service accounts within their environments and ensure proper security configurations and access control policies are in place.

To meet these challenges, it's crucial to adopt a solution capable of providing visibility into your entire service account landscape and identifying ownership and status for all accounts. This enables a continuous process for discovering, cataloging, and centralizing management of service accounts - as well as applying various best practices like password complexity requirements, credential access boundaries for temporary privilege elevation, role recommendations to identify unused permissions and lateral movement insights to reduce escalations risks.

Unprecedented Level of Access

Attackers frequently target service accounts due to their elevated privileges, making them prime targets. While a typical user account can only be used by humans, compromised service accounts can act on behalf of machines and systems using PAM/RBAC policies - making an attack against one a great way into accessing more critical systems across your network.

Service accounts offer broad access to resources, but their privileges often change over time, making it harder for administrators to keep tabs on them. Many organizations struggle to implement a policy of least privilege for service accounts and often fail to delete them when an application no longer requires its presence.

Service accounts with excessive and unwarranted access to sensitive or personal user data stored in cloud services as well as applications performing automated tasks on behalf of users (indexing or DLP) can create unintended and escalating levels of access for them. A malicious actor could gain entry to these credentials by impersonating an app and gain entry to user accounts, files and documents.

Passwords assigned to service accounts can also be difficult to synchronize across applications that use them, leading to errors that cause systems to crash or otherwise fail. For instance, using an incorrectly passworded service account on a resource may prompt the operating system to lock that account out completely - leading all services that use that account to cease functioning altogether.

Administrators should take measures to protect themselves from these risks by setting policies for the roles and permissions that service accounts can assume, including limiting permissions only where needed for tasks as well as creating an auditing process to track any changes made by these accounts. It may be useful for administrators to restrict how these service accounts interact with external resources by restricting them using IAM keys instead.

Frequently a Part of Major Breaches

Service accounts can be an easy entryway into your network for attackers, allowing them to navigate unnoticed and gain access to sensitive data without detection. They may even use credentials associated with service accounts to launch lateral attacks against other systems within your organization's networks - an opening they would likely exploit without proper service account lifecycle management processes in place. Luckily, attackers don't take advantage of such weaknesses if your teams implement effective processes for service account lifecycle management.

Unfortunately, most organizations require additional work to properly secure their service accounts. Unfortunately, service accounts are often created as part of the deployment process and then ignored after creation; leaving them open to attackers who find them lurking in the background. Furthermore, many use default passwords which are easily guessable or do not require user verification, giving attackers another way in.

As these accounts don't correspond with specific users who come and go, it can be more challenging for security teams to monitor them effectively and audit them. As a result, security teams often struggle with understanding which applications or systems belong to which security accounts - leading them to grant more privileges than necessary and potentially increasing the risk of attacks such as data breaches and ransomware attacks.

Many organizations do not regularly change the passwords for service accounts as is done with other privileged accounts, a key security practice to mitigate compromised credentials and protect against further intrusion into systems. Not doing so, leaves your service accounts exposed for extended periods and allows threat actors to exploit them and potentially perform lateral movement within your systems.

Good news is, you can reduce risks by establishing an effective service account lifecycle management process that includes provisioning, onboarding, session monitoring, de-provisioning and other security best practices. These solutions will allow you to discover all service accounts with strong passwords and granular access control solutions; and then give only those accounts needed access - all done without interfering with day-to-day operations.