Performing Privileged Account Discovery

Overview

Discover and inventory all privileged accounts across enterprise infrastructure including domain admins, local admins, service accounts, database admins, cloud IAM roles, and application admin accounts. Covers automated scanning, risk classification, and onboarding to PAM.

When to Use

• When conducting security assessments that involve performing privileged account discovery
• When following incident response procedures for related security events
• When performing scheduled security testing or auditing activities
• When validating security controls through hands-on testing

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with identity access management concepts and tools
• Access to a test or lab environment for safe execution
• Python 3.8+ with required dependencies installed
• Appropriate authorization for any testing activities

Objectives

• Implement comprehensive performing privileged account discovery capability
• Establish automated discovery and monitoring processes
• Integrate with enterprise IAM and security tools
• Generate compliance-ready documentation and reports
• Align with NIST 800-53 access control requirements

Security Controls

Control	NIST 800-53	Description
Account Management	AC-2	Lifecycle management
Access Enforcement	AC-3	Policy-based access control
Least Privilege	AC-6	Minimum necessary permissions
Audit Logging	AU-3	Authentication and access events
Identification	IA-2	User and service identification

Verification

• Implementation tested in non-production environment
• Security policies configured and enforced
• Audit logging enabled and forwarding to SIEM
• Documentation and runbooks complete
• Compliance evidence generated