In a significant advancement for identity security, SpecterOps has unveiled a powerful new feature called Privilege Zones in its flagship BloodHound Enterprise (BHE) platform. Announced on June 11, 2025, the addition expands the platform’s capability to proactively defend against identity-based threats by creating logical boundaries around mission-critical assets and enforcing the principle of least privilege—across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.
This launch comes at a critical time for IT and security teams, who often find themselves overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of identity environments. These ecosystems now span thousands of human and non-human accounts, across diverse infrastructures, making traditional identity governance models increasingly inadequate. Despite teams’ best efforts to configure identity properly, the lack of complete visibility often leads to over-permissioned accounts and hidden attack paths. These vulnerabilities are frequently exploited by adversaries for lateral movement and privilege escalation.
A Strategic Expansion of BloodHound Enterprise
SpecterOps first made waves in the cybersecurity world with BloodHound, its open-source tool that introduced the practice of Identity Attack Path Management. BloodHound Enterprise built upon that foundation, offering organizations a managed SaaS platform to visualize and eliminate attack paths—especially those targeting “Tier Zero” assets with administrative control.
With the addition of Privilege Zones, the company takes a decisive step forward. While earlier BHE capabilities focused on critical infrastructure assets, Privilege Zones now allow organizations to map and protect broader categories of business-sensitive systems, such as HIPAA-regulated healthcare environments, PCI-DSS-compliant payment platforms, and proprietary code repositories.
This innovation empowers administrators to define custom access boundaries—logical groupings of assets mapped by tier, business function, or data sensitivity. These boundaries can be technically enforced, making misconfigurations and access creep far less likely to become viable attack vectors.
Key benefits of Privilege Zones include:
- Preventing lateral movement and privilege escalation between zones
- Detecting cross-platform hybrid attack paths
- Enabling scalable enforcement of least privilege access
From Best Practice to Enforceable Reality
Historically, organizations have struggled to enforce least privilege access due to poor visibility and the limitations of policy-driven frameworks. Privilege Zones represent a shift toward technical enforcement, helping teams move from theoretical best practices to concrete identity protections.
“Defenders have tried to enforce the principle of least privilege for years, but it’s almost never worked because they didn’t have enough visibility into their identity environment,” said Justin Kohler, Chief Product Officer at SpecterOps. “BloodHound Enterprise, with the new addition of Privilege Zones, looks at the enterprise the way an adversary does, which allows them to make real progress toward that goal.”
By approaching security from the attacker’s perspective—identifying how a threat actor could chain together misconfigurations and permissions to reach sensitive systems—SpecterOps gives defenders a new advantage. Privilege Zones not only spotlight risk but also offer actionable paths to mitigate it.
Towards a Zero Trust Future
The launch of Privilege Zones also aligns closely with broader industry goals of achieving Zero Trust security models. In Zero Trust architecture, no identity or system is inherently trusted, and access is continually evaluated based on context, behavior, and least privilege principles.
Privilege Zones advance this vision by enabling cross-system privilege separation—an essential but often missing component in many enterprise Zero Trust deployments. They help convert the ideal of “trust no one, verify everything” into tangible access controls that adapt to the dynamic nature of modern infrastructure.
Availability and What’s Next
Privilege Zones will be released as a premium feature for BloodHound Enterprise. Early Access will begin in July 2025, with general availability planned for August. Security teams interested in transforming their identity security posture can find more details at specterops.io/privilege-zones.
As organizations continue to grapple with identity as the new perimeter, SpecterOps’ Privilege Zones offer a timely and technically robust solution. They reinforce the company’s position at the forefront of adversary-focused security and help enterprise defenders take a major step forward in securing what matters most.
Steven Bowcut is an award-winning journalist covering cyber and physical security. He is an editor and writer for Brilliance Security Magazine as well as other security and non-security online publications. Follow and connect with Steve on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.