Discover, Monitor, and Protect Non-Human Identities

Service Accounts Protection

Discover dormant and unmanaged service accounts, continuously detect misuse, and receive alerts on malicious service account behavior with Service Accounts Protection in Directory Services Protector.

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Gain control of your service accounts in Active Directory

Service accounts are critical to enterprise IT operations—integrating Active Directory with email, databases, and other applications and services. Not only are service accounts essential to business operations, they also are notoriously difficult to secure: 94% of organizations do not have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Security Magazine.

Security Magazine

94%

of organizations do not have full visibility into their service accounts

ReliaQuest

85%

of cyberattacks involve service accounts

IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report

240 days

average time to detect stolen credentials, including service accounts

Microsoft

1/3

of all account compromises are password spray attacks

Get complete visibility and protection for Active Directory service accounts to reduce cyberattack risk

Directory Services Protector with Service Accounts Protection provides complete visibility into your Active Directory service account posture. It continually discovers dormant and misplaced service accounts, surfaces service account risk, discovers excessive permissions, detects risky configurations and weak passwords, and alerts on malicious service account behavior. Directory Services Protector combined with Service Accounts Protection Essential uncovers service account activity and misuse, providing continual service account protection.

CONDUCT SERVICE ACCOUNT INVENTORY

Gain complete visibility and a centralized view of all your service accounts, including group memberships, permissions, and usage

REDUCE SERVICE ACCOUNT ATTACK SURFACE

Uncover and address excessive permissions in service accounts that create open doors for attackers

DETECT SERVICE ACCOUNT MISUSE

Continually monitor changes, detect misuse, and remediate risky service account configurations

Reduce risk with complete visibility and centralized control over service accounts

Directory Services Protector with Service Accounts Protection provides complete visibility into your Active Directory service account posture. Discover dormant and misplaced service accounts, manage service account risk, uncover excessive permissions, detect risky configurations, and receive alerts on malicious service account behavior.

Our mission resonates with industry leaders

DSP was the right tool for us because it simplifies the work of our technical guys, and it is always working and producing the information that we need. DSP is a very simple and seamless technology. It helps our team understand misconfigurations. It helps us comply with best practices in our Active Directory ecosystems.
Learn more Pedro Inácio Altice Portugal Head of Cyber Security and Privacy

Semperis offers superior technology, and their Directory Services Protector is a tremendous asset for any company that uses Active Directory.
Learn more Chen Amran Deputy Director of Infrastructure & Communication, El Al Airlines

It offers automated actions and a very well-designed user interface. The undo capability is worth the price.
Tariq H. Enterprise Company

We use Directory Services Protector to alert us on Group Policy changes. It has allowed us to implement stronger internal change control and improvement processes to prevent rogue IT activities that might be convenient to us but are not secure.
Chief Technology Officer Orthopedic Specialty Medical Practice

Frequently asked questions about Service Accounts Protection

What are service accounts?

Service accounts are a form of non-human identity that facilitate machine-to-machine communications to AD. For example, email platforms, databases, and internal and internet-facing applications rely on these types of accounts to integrate with AD.

Why are service accounts so difficult to secure?

Low visibility: Many Active Directory environments have been in place for years, accumulating service accounts from countless onboarded and retired applications. These accounts often remain active long after their associated apps are gone, leading to hundreds or thousands of stale entries. Traditional logging methods struggle to track service account behavior and detect malicious usage, further complicating efforts to identify and retire unused accounts.

Excessive privileges: Service accounts often have excessive privileges because application developers often require more privileges than necessary for the application or service to function, including administrative access.

Static passwords and no MFA: Service accounts often rely on static passwords that rarely change and are sometimes hard-coded into scripts or applications, making them difficult to update. Since these accounts aren’t tied to a person, they can’t use MFA, leaving them without a critical layer of protection and vulnerable to credential theft attacks.

Business criticality: When a service account loses access to AD or Entra ID because of a lockout, password change, or other issue, the associated application might stop functioning. Because these accounts often support essential services like email or databases, administrators are often reluctant to make changes that could risk downtime or disrupt business operations.

How does Directory Services Protector with Service Accounts Protection Essential address this problem?

Service Accounts Protection Essential enhances Directory Services Protector’s hybrid AD threat detection and response by:

Providing complete centralized visibility into all service accounts, their permissions, and usage
Continuously monitoring service account security posture, including excessive permissions, risky service account passwords, and anomalous logons
Reducing attack surface by discovering dormant and stale service accounts
Detecting malicious behavior and stopping service account misuse at scale with automatic rollback