A critical breach pattern where attackers establish persistent administrative control through compromised or malicious non-human identities, operating beneath traditional security visibility.
What This Breach Pattern Is
This breach pattern occurs when attackers compromise or create non-human identities—including app registrations, service principals, workload identities, and automation accounts—then silently grant them elevated administrative privileges. This creates what security professionals call a "shadow administrator."
Shadow admin persistence represents a unique threat because these identities bypass traditional security controls. They don't appear in standard admin dashboards, don't trigger MFA requirements, often evade Conditional Access policies, and authenticate using long-lived certificates or secrets rather than passwords. Actions occur through API calls rather than user interfaces, making detection exceptionally challenging.
Key Characteristics
Invisible to traditional admin monitoring
No MFA enforcement
Bypasses Conditional Access
Certificate/secret authentication
1-5 year credential validity
API-based operations
Attackers maintain cloud-wide control even after human admin accounts are reset, MFA is enforced, passwords are changed, or sessions are terminated. This makes shadow admin persistence one of the most stealthy and durable techniques in identity compromise.
Attacker Objectives
Persistent Access
Maintain long-term hidden administrative access that survives credential rotations and security remediation efforts.
Silent Operations
Perform privileged operations with minimal detection risk, including provisioning malicious identities and creating backdoor OAuth applications.
Security Evasion
Escalate roles via Graph/API, disable logging and monitoring systems, and manage cloud infrastructure programmatically.
Data Exfiltration
Access and extract sensitive data across cloud platforms and SaaS applications while impersonating legitimate automation systems.
Shadow admins function as hidden root accounts, providing attackers with comprehensive control over the identity infrastructure without triggering standard security alerts or requiring human interaction.
Service principals granted Directory Admin, Application Admin, or Identity & Access Management roles without proper oversight or detection mechanisms in place.
2
MC-412: Certificate-Based Credentials with Long Validity
Authentication certificates with validity periods spanning 1-5 years used for high-privilege access, creating extended windows of opportunity for compromise.
3
MC-413: Non-Human Identities Exempt from MFA & CA
Machine identities configured to bypass multi-factor authentication, Conditional Access policies, and device trust requirements entirely.
4
MC-414: Lack of Privileged Identity Reviews
Shadow admin identities systematically excluded from periodic access reviews and privilege audits, allowing undetected persistence.
DL-056: Suspicious Service Principal Authentication
Unexpected application or certificate-based authentication events originating from unusual IP addresses, geographic locations, or outside normal operational hours.
DL-024: Unusual Graph or Cloud API Admin Actions
Service principals performing administrative-level directory modifications or cloud infrastructure tasks inconsistent with their documented purpose.
DL-088: Covert Privilege Escalation via API
Role elevation activities occurring through API calls not associated with known human administrators or standard automation workflows.
DL-041: Lateral API Token Issuance
Machine identity tokens being used to perform privileged lateral movement actions across different services or resource boundaries.
Shadow admin persistence allows attackers to re-enter and re-own the environment even after comprehensive remediation efforts, making it one of the most challenging threats to fully eradicate.
Stolen service principal credentials enable rapid privilege escalation across cloud infrastructure, bypassing traditional user-based security controls.
ETS-007
Identity Drift → Targeted Escalation
Gradual accumulation of excessive permissions on non-human identities creates exploitable pathways for privilege escalation attacks.
These storylines represent real-world attack scenarios where shadow admin persistence plays a critical role in achieving attacker objectives. Understanding these patterns enables security teams to develop more effective detection and response strategies.
Technical Analysis Summary
1-5
Years
Typical credential validity period for compromised certificates
4
Attack Stages
Identity attack chain components leveraged in this pattern
100%
MFA Bypass
Complete circumvention of multi-factor authentication controls