In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape most organizations rely heavily on IT systems to streamline operations and stay competitive. While some of these systems are managed and secured by IT and security departments, increasingly many are not because they are not officially sanctioned. They are often referred to as shadow IT, shadow clouds, shadow VPNs and shadow password managers.
To this “shadow” list should be added shadow admins. These are individuals who have administrative or privileged roles within specific IT systems—and they haven’t been formally authorized for this privilege. In this blog post we’ll cover why shadow admins are so risky and what you can do about them.
Who are shadow IT admins?
Shadow IT admins typically have technical or functional expertise. As such, they may set up, configure or manage certain services. Often these admins act out of a desire to address immediate business needs. However, they often don’t have a plan for long-term management. Neither do they typically consider the organization’s governance, risk and compliance (GRC) requirements. As a result, their actions can lead to significant risks for the organization, especially if they are not well-versed in security best practices or the organization’s GRC policies. What happens if they are managing systems that contain sensitive data or support critical business processes?
Why do shadow IT admins exist?
Shadow IT admins usually emerge when people get frustrated with official processes and priorities when it comes to acquiring and managing IT. Here are some common issues:
- Slow IT response. Functional teams inside an organization might need an IT solution immediately but find that the IT department is bogged down by slow approval or long deployment queues.
- Lack of resources. IT departments may not have the bandwidth to address every request, leading individuals or departments to take matters into their own hands.
- Unmet needs. Business units and their associated shadow admins often introduce services or systems that they believe will serve them better than what they can access through approved and supported systems.
- Innovation and agility. In some cases, shadow IT admins are driven by a desire for innovation. They might be introducing new tools or technologies that can drive the business forward but do so outside the official IT structure. And as part of this they take on IT admin ownership of the unsanctioned system.
The risks of shadow IT admins
While shadow IT admins often have good intentions, they can unwittingly expose the organization to a variety of risks. Attackers can exploit these accounts to perform privileged actions, like creating backdoors, altering security settings, exfiltrating sensitive data or bringing down systems all together. Attackers can also use these accounts to hide their tracks. This enables them to avoid detection so that they can maintain control over the compromised system.
There are also shadow admin risks that are associated with Active Directory. Threat actors can use shadow admin accounts in Active Directory to take control of directory services, reset passwords and escalate their privileges. What’s more, by identifying these accounts, attackers can elevate their access level—and they often don’t need additional exploits to do it, either. One reason shadow admin accounts are such a significant risk is because they often go unnoticed until well after they’ve been exploited.
For a recent highly public example of a breach that involved shadow IT and shadow admin accounts, check out Microsoft’s Midnight Blizzard attack.
6 Ways that shadow admins add risk to organizations
These are six areas where shadow admins cause an impact.
1: Security vulnerabilities
Shadow IT admins often bypass critical security processes that have been set up by the IT department. This can lead to various security risks, such as:
- Weak access controls. Shadow IT admins might grant themselves or others excessive permissions to applications or data. This can enable unauthorized access or backdoors into critical systems. This is problematic not only because they lack the proper oversight, but also threat actors love to take control of these user accounts.
- Misconfigured systems. When shadow IT admins don’t use proper security configurations, they may create systems that are improperly configured. This increases the risk that attackers will exploit them.
2: Data breaches and loss
Many shadow IT services involve handling sensitive data, which might be in the form of financial records, intellectual property or customer information. When shadow IT admins manage this data without proper oversight, it increases the likelihood of:
- Data leakage. Systems or applications that are configured by shadow IT admins may not be encrypted properly, have the right access controls set up or be sufficiently monitored. This leads to data leaks or confidential information being shared in unauthorized ways.
- Data loss. If shadow IT admins do not back up systems properly, or they store data in insecure environments like personal cloud services, the organization risks losing critical data in the event of a system failure or as a result of a cyberattack like ransomware.
3: Non-compliance with regulations
For organizations that need to follow to regulatory standards—such as GDPR, HIPAA or SOC 2—shadow IT admins can cause significant compliance issues. Since shadow systems and accounts often don’t undergo the same rigorous checks and audits as official IT systems, they may fail to meet the necessary security or privacy requirements to meet the regulations. This can result in:
- Legal and financial penalties. When organizations aren’t compliant with regulations, they can expect to incur fines as well as experience legal problems and damage to their reputation.
- Lack of audit trails. Shadow IT systems may not have the required logging or monitoring in place. This makes it difficult to trace data movements and changes, which can be problematic in an audit or forensic investigation.
4: Operational inefficiency
Shadow IT admin accounts may solve immediate problems. However, their continued existence can create long-term operational inefficiencies:
- Data silos. Shadow IT admins often introduce systems that don’t integrate well with the central IT infrastructure. As a result, data storage is fragmented and there are difficulties using data across departments.
- Inconsistent processes. When multiple teams use different and unapproved tools, there are often inconsistencies in workflows. This makes it harder for the organization to streamline processes or gain a unified view of business operations.
5: Difficulty in incident response
If a cyberattack or data breach occurs, it may take significantly longer for the IT department to identify and respond if shadow IT admins need to be involved. Because shadow IT services and accounts are not typically documented or monitored, the IT team may not even be aware of all the impacted systems or the people who need to be involved in a response. This lack of visibility can severely delay incident response and containment efforts. This, in turn, increases the damage caused by security incidents.
6: Increased IT burden
When shadow IT and associated shadow admins are discovered, IT teams must go through a time-consuming process of onboarding them. This includes auditing, securing and integrating these systems into official IT systems and processes. It’s an unplanned burden that’s added to the IT team’s workload. What’s more, it diverts valuable resources away from more critical projects while increasing operational costs.
Bringing shadow admins out of the shadows
To address the risks of shadow IT admins, IT and security teams should use these proactive strategies:
- Enhance visibility and monitoring. Use tools like SaaS security and posture management (SSPM), data loss prevention (DLP) and identity threat detection and response (ITDR) to get visibility into unsanctioned services and shadow admins.
- Enforce access controls. Implement privileged access management (PAM) and centralized authentication services with multifactor authentication (MFA) and SSO (identity provider services) to ensure only authorized individuals can act as IT admins.
- Create a clear IT policy. Develop and communicate clear policies that define what IT services and systems are approved for use. Then, ensure that all employees understand the potential risks of shadow IT. And make sure that they have a clear way to raise key IT business priorities so that they don’t feel they need to resort to shadow IT in the future. But remain realistic as shadow IT and the associated shadow admins are likely going to be a fact of life for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion
While shadow IT admins think that they’re acting in an organization’s best interest, they can introduce significant risks that put its security, compliance and operations at risk. By taking proactive steps to manage and mitigate these risks, organizations can better protect themselves from harm.
Proofpoint constantly invests in our products and services to help our customers discover and remediate shadow IT and shadow admins before they negatively impact their business. Here are just two of our solutions:
- Proofpoint Account Takeover Protection flags the usage of unsanctioned and malicious third-party applications and remediates them as part of detecting and responding to account takeovers.
- Proofpoint Identity Threat Defense is our ITDR solution. It discovers and guides the remediation of shadow admin accounts in Active Directory as well as multiple cloud identity providers as part of its overall capabilities.
There is much more to come from Proofpoint in this space in 2025. To learn more about our identity security solutions, visit this web page.