BeyondTrust

Meet Beekon: A Smarter, Faster Way to Get BeyondTrust Support At BeyondTrust, solving real-world problems for our customers doesn't stop with the technology we build. It extends to every part of their experience with us, including when they need technical support. As part of our continued effort to enhance that experience, we've been listening to the things that matter most when our customers open a support case.

Ask any security leader how many identities exist in their environment and watch hesitation cross their face. It’s not because they don't care—it’s the exact opposite. They honestly don’t know. When organizations tally human accounts, service accounts, machine identities, API keys, ephemeral cloud workloads, and AI agents, the sheer quantity of identities becomes a guesstimate rather than a concrete fact.

Organizations rarely discover AI governance gaps in strategy meetings. They discover them when a vendor quietly adds AI capabilities to an existing platform, or when a developer accepts AI-generated code because it looks credible. AI often enters the enterprise through ordinary everyday work, whether as a productivity feature, embedded assistant, or third-party integration.

Powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) built on human-generated text, AI has across a broad spectrum of tasks met or surpassed the humans whose data it was trained on. AI-powered tools have been rapidly integrated into IT systems and workflows. At the forefront of this shift is their use by IT professionals (software engineers, administrators, security teams, etc.) to automate previously time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks.

Recent attacks on water and wastewater systems have highlighted a longstanding risk associated with internet-exposed PLCs and other operational technology (see Water and Wastewater Cyberattacks Are Escalating: What State and Local Leaders Should Do Now for the full incident details and immediate remediation steps). Removing those systems from the public internet is an important first step, but it doesn't eliminate the need for remote access.

It was a single line in the SOC 2 Type II report, easy to miss, buried deep within the access management section. "Users were found to have persistent administrative access to production systems with no evidence of access reviews or time-bound provisioning. This represents a significant deficiency." For many organizations, a finding like this is less about one isolated permission and more about a broader access governance gap.

Modern service desks operate under constant pressure to resolve issues quickly while maintaining strict control over access and credentials. Far too often, service desk efficiency and security are treated as competing priorities, forcing teams to trade speed for governance or governance for speed. This compromise extends to knowledge transfer as well. As IT environments expand and issues become more complex, support teams must maintain proper session hygiene and reporting to keep everyone aligned.

Introducing the Phantom Labs® Research Index: Year One By the Numbers AuthorsDavid van Heerden & Phantom Labs™ Since Marc Maiffret and Kinnaird McQuade founded BeyondTrust Phantom Labs® in 2025, the team has chased down more than 400 research ideas across AI, detection engineering, cloud service providers, SaaS, graph analytics, identity and access management, and non-human identity (NHI) risk.

AI Agents have become a part of everyone's workflow. The more people interacting with these agents, the higher the desire to integrate these agents with third-party applications like Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams), Google Workspace, GitHub, etc. This makes individual workflows faster and easier. But at what cost? Are we just allowing these agents any scope they want for these applications? Are we monitoring the application requests coming from these agents?

Privileged access used to end at the session. You granted access, monitored it, recorded it, and if you needed to understand what happened, you had to manually review hours of recordings. BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) 26.2 changes that.