Written by: Bhavesh Dhake, Will Silverstone, Matthew Hitchcock, Aaron Fletcher
The Criticality of Privileged Access in Today’s Threat Landscape
Privileged access stands as the most critical pathway for adversaries seeking to compromise sensitive systems and data. Its protection is not only a best practice, it is a fundamental imperative for organizational resilience. The increasing complexity of modern IT environments, exacerbated by rapid cloud migration, has led to a surge in both human and non-human identities, comprising privileged accounts and virtual systems [compute workloads such as virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless functions, plus their control planes], significantly expanding the overall attack surface. This environment presents escalating challenges in identity and access management, cross-platform system security, and effective staffing, making the establishment and maintenance of a robust security posture increasingly challenging.
The threat landscape is continuously evolving, with a pronounced shift towards attacks that exploit privileged access. Mandiant’s 2025 M-Trends report highlights that stolen credentials have surpassed email phishing to become the second-most frequently observed initial access method, accounting for 16% of intrusions in 2024. This resurgence is fueled, in part, by the proliferation of infostealer malware campaigns, which facilitate the collection and trade of compromised user credentials. However, threat actors of all types have found myriad new ways to compromise identity, including social engineering, which has been on the rise alongside several other tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). ENISA documents criminal use of generative
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