The top 8 ways hackers gain access to privileged accounts

Edward Snowden is the world's most famous rogue employee. A former NSA contractor who stole highly secretive information and disclosed it to the media, the ramifications of which seem to have no end, the case Snowden might seem like an extreme example - but employees going rogue is not all that uncommon within organisations.

Large organisations typically have thousands of privileged accounts, which are often left unmanaged. Once a hacker accesses a password through one of these internal or external attack vectors, the intruder can leapfrog from system to system, compromising privileged accounts throughout the organisation until the IT infrastructure is mapped and its most valued information can be extracted at will.

Rogue insiders, former employees, criminal hackers and sophisticated state-sponsored attackers can exploit these unmanaged privileged accounts to anonymously access and extract an organisation's most critical data.

In this article, we count down the most common attack vectors, so you can be prepared.
 
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