Hey folks, I’ve been seeing LAPS pop up a lot in security discussions lately, especially around managing local admin accounts.
Can someone explain what LAPS actually is in plain terms? What problem does it solve, and why are so many teams moving toward it now?
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Glad someone asked this. We still have the same local admin password across a bunch of machines, and I know that’s not great. Trying to understand if LAPS is really worth the effort.
Also curious–is LAPS just a Windows thing, or does it apply to macOS too? We’re running a mixed environment.
This is a good topic to dig into.
Most teams start looking at LAPS because of exactly what @timo-liam mentioned–shared local admin passwords. It works fine until it doesn’t. Once one device is compromised, that same password can be used to hop across other machines.
LAPS, short for Local Administrator Password Solution, fixes that by giving every device its own local admin password and rotating it automatically. You don’t have to remember or manually reset anything, and there’s no single password that puts everything at risk.
Where Hexnode comes in is making this practical to manage day-to-day.
For Windows, you can enable LAPS through a policy and let password rotation happen quietly in the background. When an admin actually needs the password, it’s available securely from the console.
On macOS too, it’s the same idea. Hexnode lets you manage local admin accounts and rotate their passwords automatically, so Macs don’t end up being handled manually or left out of your security model.
So if someone somehow gets the local admin password from one device, that doesn’t help them anywhere else?
Exactly. That password is only valid for that one device, and it’ll change again based on the rotation policy. That’s the whole point-to limit the blast radius if something goes wrong.
That clears it up. I always thought LAPS was Windows-only. Good to know macOS is covered too.
This helps a lot. Makes it way clearer why people keep pushing LAPS instead of just “being careful” with admin passwords.
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