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Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary
A break-glass account is a tightly monitored emergency privileged account used when normal admin or identity provider access fails, ensuring recovery access.
Break-Glass Account Definition: A break-glass account is a tightly monitored emergency privileged account used when normal admin or identity provider access fails, ensuring recovery access.
A break-glass account is a highly privileged emergency access account reserved for situations where normal authentication or administrative paths fail, such as an outage of the identity provider or loss of standard administrator access. These accounts are deliberately excluded from policies that could lock them out, like conditional access enforcement, but are tightly secured with strong unique credentials, stored secrets, heightened monitoring, and alerting on any use. Their existence balances availability and resilience against the elevated risk of a standing privileged credential.
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