Privilege escalation differs significantly between on-premises and cloud environments. In traditional on-premises setups, attackers compromise endpoints, steal credentials, and move laterally across assets, often taking over domain controllers after months of effort. In contrast, the cloud removes these barriers, where compromising a single privileged identity or shadow admin can grant immediate access to critical resources like data stores, virtual machines, and applications. This makes cloud attacks faster, often unfolding in minutes instead of over 100 days. Reducing permissions and minimizing pathways to sensitive resources is crucial for strong cloud security.

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