Overprivileged Service Account Exploitation

Overprivileged Service Account Exploitation occurs during the Expanding Control phase when attackers leverage service accounts that possess excessive permissions beyond what is required for their intended function. Within the Service-to-Service Trust Abuse technique, this sub-technique focuses on identifying and exploiting service accounts that have been assigned unnecessarily broad privileges or access rights. Attackers who have compromised a system can enumerate service accounts, analyze their permission sets, and exploit those with elevated privileges to extend their access across the environment. These overprivileged accounts—often created for automation, application-to-application communication, or database access—frequently have persistent, long-lived credentials and minimal monitoring, making them ideal targets for lateral movement. The exploitation typically involves extracting credentials from configuration files, memory, or connection strings, then leveraging the account's excessive permissions to access sensitive systems, data stores, or cloud resources that would otherwise be inaccessible from the initially compromised position. This represents a critical security weakness where the principle of least privilege has not been properly implemented, allowing attackers to significantly escalate their foothold within an organization's infrastructure.