BeyondTrust launches AI tool to bolster identity security

BeyondTrust has announced the release of True Privilege, a new AI-powered tool within its Identity Security Insights, designed to enhance identity security by uncovering access effective across complex IT environments.

True Privilege utilises AI-driven graph analysis to identify hidden attack paths and the cascading impacts of misconfigurations, thereby offering visibility and reducing risks often missed by traditional privileged account management (PAM) systems.

Commenting on the approach, John Lambert, formerly of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, noted, "Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs." True Privilege maps the intricate web of relationships and interconnections among identities, accounts, and privileges, across modern hybrid cloud environments, to expose the hidden paths to privilege that may be exploited by attackers.

This new tool allows organisations to view their identity estate from the perspective of an attacker, understand the complex indirect paths to privilege that can be exploited, and prioritise remediation that significantly impacts security across various platforms such as endpoints, servers, and cloud services.

Sam Elliott, SVP of Products at BeyondTrust, stated, "Organisations are overlooking the indirect ways that attackers can gain access to the privileges of human, machine, and workload identities due to increasingly interconnected systems, accumulated standing privilege, and silos most modern businesses are challenged with--but attackers aren't overlooking these paths to privilege." Elliott emphasised that True Privilege offers mitigation by displacing standing privileges with just-in-time (JIT) access to enhance resilience against compromised identities.

The technology analyses extensive identity data from various sources, including directory services like Active Directory, cloud identity services like Entra ID, Ping, Okta, and infrastructure platforms such as AWS and GCP, in addition to BeyondTrust's identity security products. The advanced analysis considers complex interactions and configurations to calculate the effective privilege of an identity, detecting unusual behaviour which may signify a breach and acting on it preemptively.

True Privilege is seen as a complement to traditional PAM strategies, going further by revealing how all types of identities access privileges. By integrating with other BeyondTrust solutions, it aims to advance security by highlighting excessive privileges and offering a comprehensive picture of an organisation's security posture.

This capability is intended to broaden the effectiveness of BeyondTrust products like Password Safe and Endpoint Privilege Management by fostering the principle of least privilege and JIT access across enterprise use cases through a unified interface.

With this added visibility, True Privilege seeks to enhance the security stack by helping organisations identify and eliminate unnecessary access routes, contributing to a more secure environment.