Can CTEM Address the Hidden Gaps in Your PAM Program?

Traditional Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions have long played a critical role in identity security. They are the cornerstone of a zero-trust model, designed to protect the most powerful accounts in an organization. PAM controls help secure, manage, and monitor access to critical systems and data, ensuring that only authorized users with the right privileges can perform sensitive tasks. This is typically achieved through credential rotation, just-in-time access, and session isolation. In short, PAM is about a basic but essential question: “Who has the keys to the kingdom?”

However, most of them lack a threat-led approach that connects a company’s PAM story to broader cyber risks within an organization, potentially leading to business-critical exposures falling through the cracks. While PAM can safeguard high-privileged accounts, it’s still the organization’s responsibility to identify and decide which accounts are the most critical and which identities present the greatest risk.

But that’s not a simple task. Once an attacker gains initial access – whether through a phishing email, a vulnerable public-facing app, or a compromised endpoint – the next move is often privilege escalation. Understanding where those escalations are most likely to succeed requires context: which identities are exposed, how they’re connected, and where those pathways ultimately lead.

In this blog, we’ll explore how Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and attack graph analysis can provide the operational framework needed to address the above risks dynamically. CTEM is essential to PAM but doesn’t replace it; it makes it smarter and more effective by integrating threat intelligence into your identity security program. It shifts the focus from simply securing a list of accounts to actively understanding and disrupting the most likely attack paths an adversary would take to compromise your organization.

Why CTEM and Attack Graph Analysis Are Essential for Modern PAM

While PAM solutions are excellent at controlling who has privileged access, they don’t always provide the context of how an attacker would reach and exploit those privileges. This is where CTEM, specifically through attack path analysis, fills the critical gap. It moves beyond a point-in-time assessment of privileges and instead provides a dynamic, threat-led view of your environment.

Attack path analysis, a core component of a CTEM framework, maps both inbound and outbound paths to and from entities—identities, devices, or services—based on real-world attacker behavior. By doing so, it surfaces how minor misconfigurations, unmonitored identities, and improperly scoped permissions can be chained together to compromise the company’s critical assets. This approach answers the most pressing question for security teams: “Even with PAM in place, how could an attacker still get in?”

Attack Paths That Challenge PAM Defenses

By integrating attack path analysis with PAM, security teams can identify strategic places where attackers are likely to pivot and where remediation must be prioritized. Examples include:

Shadow accounts with latent admin privileges: Dormant or unmanaged accounts may retain administrative privileges due to old policies or incomplete deprovisioning. These are often excluded from PAM oversight but retain access to critical systems.

Vaulted-only credentials with no password rotation policy: Privileged accounts that are vaulted for the first time or configured for use with automation, might be vaulted without enforcing  proper credential rotation. These often get a pass due to productivity issues or downtime risks but over time, they become static, high-value targets. Finding attack paths that are exploiting these credentials is essential.

Disabled privileged session isolation and auditing: PAM solutions typically offer secure session isolation and auditing. But if those features are disabled due to performance concerns or operational pushback, privileged sessions become opaque – making lateral movement and credential harvesting harder to detect.

PAM systems with excessive standing privileges: PAM solutions require elevated access to perform credential management, but if the solution itself holds persistent domain admin or root access without just-in-time controls, it can become a single point of compromise.

Insufficient PAM infrastructure hardening: Attackers increasingly target PAM systems themselves. If any of the PAM components are exposed, they become very attractive entry points or stepping stones in the attack chain.

From Point Solutions to Exposure Reduction

CTEM provides the operational framework needed to address the above risks dynamically. Instead of relying on annual audits or static privilege reports, CTEM emphasizes a threat-led approach, which allows security teams to:

• Prioritize privileged accounts that are both exposed and reachable from mapped attack paths
• Identify the credentials most likely to be abused in a lateral movement scenario and privilege escalation points
• Validate whether PAM policies are actively mitigating attacker pathways in real-world conditions

This provides both strategic clarity and operational leverage. It shifts the conversation from “Do we have a PAM in place?” to “How can we optimize our PAM deployment to reduce business-critical exposures?” and “Is our PAM solution actually doing anything to reduce risk in case of an attack?” These are far more meaningful questions when aligning identity controls with business risk. 

Ultimately, if identity is the new perimeter, then embedding CTEM framework within your PAM program is not just about building another stack – it activates a strategic risk control. PAM is and will remain a vital component of identity security, but in  hybrid, cloud-native environments, it’s no longer enough on its own. Privileged access must be understood in the context of threat exposure; who can reach what, how is it executed and what is the impact. Organizations that integrate exposure management principles into their identity programs will be better equipped to reduce lateral movement and privilege escalation,  protect critical assets, and minimize the blast radius of a compromise.

Because when it comes to privileged access, control without context is a risk in and of itself.