Discover Credentials and Privileged Accounts Before Cyber Attackers Do

Most organizations can tell you how many employees, endpoints, and servers they manage. Far fewer can confidently answer how many privileged accounts, service accounts, shared credentials, or orphaned administrator accounts exist across their environment.

This lack of visibility creates security risks. Credentials that are forgotten, unmanaged, or unnecessarily privileged can provide the intruders with access to paths into critical systems.

Ransomware groups, Nation-State Attackers (APTs), Initial Access Brokers (IABs), Supply-chain attackers, Infostealer Malware Operators, and, not to forget, employees imposing insider threats are the attackers who use discovered credentials to compromise organizations. These malicious actors often target service accounts, unattended administrator accounts, and shared root credentials that have not changed in years. These credentials can later be used to move laterally across the network and gain access to sensitive systems and data.

In this blog, we will explore what credential discovery is, why attackers target hidden credentials, and how organizations secure credentials and strengthen security through implementing credential governance with the help of password manager solutions.

What is credential discovery?

Credential discovery involves identifying passwords, privileged accounts, service accounts, SSH keys, API keys, and other credentials that are distributed across an organization's environment.

Think of it as creating a complete inventory of identities and secrets across Windows servers, Linux systems, workstations, applications, databases, cloud environments, and network devices. The goal is simple: discover hidden credentials before attackers do.

Many organizations do not struggle with password policies alone; they struggle with visibility. Credentials often exist in places that are difficult to monitor, including legacy systems, scripts, applications, shared folders, and retired projects. Without visibility into these credentials, security teams may be unaware of risks that could be exploited by the malicious users.

Over time, credentials are created through projects, deployments, temporary access requests, contractor engagements, and application integrations. In many cases, these accounts remain active long after the associated system, application, or project has been retired. If left undiscovered and unmanaged, these credentials can become valuable targets for threat operators and create unnecessary security risks.

Why do cyber attackers care about credential discovery?

Credential discovery is not only performed by defenders. Attackers also search for credentials after gaining access to a system. Their objective is to identify passwords, service accounts, API keys, SSH keys, and privileged accounts that can help them expand access within the environment.

A compromised user account may provide access to only a single system, but discovering a privileged account can unlock access to additional servers, databases, applications, and cloud resources. Unauthorized users use these credentials to move laterally, escalate privileges, and gain control over critical assets. This is why hidden, unmanaged, and orphaned credentials are often valuable targets during cyberattacks.

Finding accounts is only the first step

A credential discovery scan may uncover hundreds of local administrator accounts, service accounts, shared credentials, and orphaned privileged accounts across an environment.

Discovery alone is not enough. Organizations must determine:

• Who owns these accounts?

• Who has access to them?

• What level of privilege do they have?

• Which accounts introduce unnecessary risk?

Beyond discovery: Securing and governing privileged credentials

Having identified credentials, they need to be captured and managed. Credential discovery reveals the accounts you have. Credential governance establishes instructions for managing a credential lifecycle, monitoring it, and protecting it.

Organizations should:

• Own privileged accounts – There should be an owner for every privileged account for access review, access approval, and ensuring that the privileged account is needed.

• Identify and turn off abandoned accounts – When employees leave the organization or applications and projects are retired, associated privileged accounts should be reviewed, reassigned, or disabled to minimize risk.

• Keep passwords in a central repository – Passwords or other credentials should be kept in a centralized repository, not spreadsheets, documents or personal notes.

• Have workflows for approvals – Privileged access should be authorized by designated approvers, with access being granted only as necessary.

• Track privileged account activity – Organizations should be aware of who accesses privileged accounts, when and what they do, to ensure more accountability and threat detection.

• Rotate passwords – All privileged and service account passwords should be changed periodically, according to policy, minimizing the risk posed by static passwords or passwords that are easily guessed.

• Ensure audit trails are maintained – All access to credentials, approvals, password changes and privileged activity must be tracked to facilitate compliance, investigations and security reviews.

• Follow "least privilege" policies – Ensure that users, applications and service accounts have only the privileges necessary to do their jobs, limiting opportunities to escalate privileges.

How to secure discovered credentials?

Discovering credentials is only useful if there's something organizations can do with the information. That's where enterprise password managers come into play. Modern password management solutions have much more to offer than secure password storage.

They can help organizations identify privileged accounts, discover service accounts, store credentials in a centralized vault, assign ownership, implement approval workflows, automate password rotation, and maintain comprehensive audit trails.

Credential discovery and governance can be combined into the same platform with enterprise password manager solutions like CyberArk, BeyondTrust, Securden Password Vault (higher editions), and Keeper Security. Upon discovery of credentials, they can be safely stored, shared with a select few users, monitored and controlled by organizational policy.

Strengthening security through automation, visibility, and least privilege

These solutions are particularly effective for organizations requiring governance software to support service accounts, password rotation, and approval processes. They also can be used to find local administrator accounts on all servers and privileged accounts in mixed Windows and Linux environments.

The platforms automatically detect shared root and domain admin passwords, rotate passwords, and minimize risks with unmanaged privileged access. Organizations can even automatically discover and enroll privileged accounts into a secure vault, even if they don't have an exhaustive list of administrator accounts.

Also, they assist security groups in visualizing privileged account ownership, locating legacy systems’ application and service accounts, finding orphaned accounts, and implementing least-privilege policies via cloud admin, monitoring and access management.

Enterprise password managers eliminate spreadsheets, shared documents and manual tracking, offering a single location of visibility and control of privileged credentials. This helps mitigate the risks of unmanaged accounts, orphaned credentials, too many privileges and long-lived passwords, and helps enhance accountability and compliance readiness.

Conclusion

Credentials are among the most valuable assets in any organization, yet many remain hidden across servers, applications, databases, cloud environments, and network devices. Forgotten administrator accounts, orphaned service accounts, shared credentials, and unmanaged privileged access can introduce significant security risks if left undiscovered.

Credential discovery provides organizations with the visibility needed to identify these hidden accounts and credentials before they can be exploited by the threat actors. However, discovery alone is not enough. Organizations must also establish ownership, enforce least-privilege access, implement password rotation, maintain audit trails, and govern the entire credential lifecycle.

As organizations continue to adopt new applications, cloud services, automation tools, and third-party integrations, new credentials are constantly being created. Regular credential discovery helps maintain visibility, reduce security blind spots, and ensure privileged access remains under control.

By combining credential discovery with strong governance and centralized credential management, organizations can significantly reduce their attack surface and strengthen their overall security posture.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are unmanaged credentials?

Unmanaged credentials are passwords, privileged accounts, service accounts, SSH keys or secrets that are never monitored, rotated or managed by a centralized security process. These credentials often turn into security blind spots.

What is Privileged Account Discovery (PAD)?

Privileged account discovery refers to the act of finding accounts that have higher privileges throughout an organization. This is part of credential discovery but specifically targeting accounts which can gain access to sensitive systems or data.

How frequently should organizations conduct credential discovery?

Credential discovery should be performed on a regular basis. There are regular additions to new accounts, applications, services, and infrastructure that require regular discovery to ensure visibility.

What's the difference between a service account and a privileged account?

A service account is an account that is not associated with a user but is used by applications or services. Any account that has a higher level of access is considered a privileged account. There are also some accounts of the services that have wide access to systems and resources that are also privileged accounts.

Why is it important to have ownership of privileged accounts?

If privileged accounts aren't assigned to an owner, they're likely to be unmanaged and can accumulate too many permissions. Ownership will enhance accountability, regular reviews, and access validation.

Is credential discovery a way to implement the principle of least privilege?

Yes. In the process of discovery, credentials are located that can be used to establish that there are too many privileges, shared credentials, and unnecessary privileged access. This visibility is a first step to implementing least-privilege controls.