Privileged user sessions don't have long lived sign-in sessions

Overview

When privileged users are allowed to maintain long-lived sign-in sessions without periodic reauthentication, threat actors can gain extended windows of opportunity to exploit compromised credentials or hijack active sessions. Once a privileged account is compromised through techniques like credential theft, phishing, or session fixation, extended session timeouts allow threat actors to maintain persistence within the environment for prolonged periods. With long-lived sessions, threat actors can perform lateral movement across systems, escalate privileges further, and access sensitive resources without triggering another authentication challenge. The extended session duration also increases the window for session hijacking attacks, where threat actors can steal session tokens and impersonate the privileged user. Once a threat actor is established in a privileged session, they can:

• Create backdoor accounts
• Modify security policies
• Access sensitive data
• Establish more persistence mechanisms

The lack of periodic reauthentication requirements means that even if the original compromise is detected, the threat actor might continue operating undetected using the hijacked privileged session until the session naturally expires or the user manually signs out.

Remediation

• Learn about Conditional Access adaptive session lifetime policies
• Configure sign-in frequency for privileged users with Conditional Access policies

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	Medium
Effort to fix	Low
Impact on users	Medium
Pillar	Identity
Category	Access control
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Conditional Access
Area	Privileged access
ATT&CK	T1550.004 Web Session Cookie, T1539 Steal Web Session Cookie
Licence	P1
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.