Silverfort

What Silverfort actually does

Silverfort sits as a proxy between your identity provider (usually Active Directory) and authentication requests. It intercepts every authentication event — Kerberos, NTLM, LDAP, RDP — and applies risk-based MFA and access policies without touching the target system. No agents on endpoints. No changes to application code.

The real value is in the places nobody else can reach. Service accounts that authenticate thousands of times a day. Legacy apps running on ancient Windows servers. CIFS file shares. Command-line admin tools. These are the blind spots attackers exploit for lateral movement, and Silverfort makes them visible and enforceable.

It also provides discovery of service accounts and machine-to-machine authentication patterns. Most organizations don’t know how many service accounts they have. Silverfort maps them and shows which ones are over-privileged or exhibiting anomalous behavior.

Who it’s best for

• Enterprises with large Active Directory environments and significant legacy infrastructure
• Security teams trying to enforce MFA on service accounts and non-human identities
• Organizations dealing with lateral movement risks and pass-the-hash/pass-the-ticket attacks
• Companies in regulated industries that need to demonstrate MFA coverage across all systems
• Teams that have tried and failed to retrofit MFA onto legacy applications

Pricing reality check

Silverfort is enterprise-priced. Expect annual contracts based on the number of users and protected resources. It’s not a small-team purchase — the product makes the most sense at scale, and the sales process reflects that.

The deployment itself is relatively lightweight on the infrastructure side (virtual appliance integrated with AD), but the policy tuning takes real effort. Budget for professional services or internal time to map your authentication flows before you start blocking anything.

Alternatives to consider

• CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection — Covers identity threat detection but requires the Falcon agent. Different approach, similar lateral movement protection.
• Microsoft Entra ID (Conditional Access) — Works well for cloud-native and Entra-joined systems. Falls short on legacy on-prem the same way Silverfort excels.
• Delinea (Secret Server) — If your main problem is privileged credential management rather than authentication enforcement, PAM may be the better fit.
• Okta — Strong for SSO and cloud app MFA. Doesn’t touch the on-prem legacy authentication problem Silverfort was built for.

The Charting Cyber take

Silverfort fills a gap nobody else addresses well — enforcing identity security on the systems that predate modern authentication standards. If you’ve been told “we can’t put MFA on that,” Silverfort is probably worth evaluating.

The catch is that identity environments are messy. The product works, but you need to invest in understanding your own authentication landscape before turning enforcement on. Organizations that treat this as a quick deploy will have a rough time. Those that plan properly get real risk reduction in places that were previously unprotectable.