New research from Osterman and Silverfort reveals that although nearly 70 percent of organizations believe their identity defenses are ‘mature’ there is a worrying gap between perception and reality.
This comes against a rising tide of identity threats, 72.1 percent of identity leaders report that the threat level of identity-related attacks has increased or remained unchanged in the past year. The most significant jumps include AI-powered attacks, ransomware-based attacks, and social engineering of desk staff to reset credentials or MFA factors (up 14.3 percent).
Nearly every organization surveyed (93.7 percent) is concerned about account takeover due to compromised credentials in the next two years. What’s more one in 10 Fortune 500 employees have had their credentials exposed in the last three years, posing a significant risk for account takeover. Adversaries have also become more interested in stealing and abusing compromised credentials,
The report shows that four out of five identity leaders don’t have full visibility into three critical risks: service accounts behaving in unexpected ways, authentication session tokens being used in abnormal locations, and compromised employee credentials for sale on the dark web.
Over three quarters of organizations have less than full and complete visibility into 14 different identity threats and security fundamentals. Lack of visibility into identity vulnerabilities is a critical shortcoming to address because identity-led attacks start with just one compromised identity-related asset, such as a credential for sale on a dark web forum.
For organizations using tools to detect compromised credentials on the dark web, 60 percent claim maturity, but only 22 percent can show evidence of it. For backup and recovery of identity platforms, 71 percent claim maturity, but only 41 percent have the evidence to back it up.
The report’s authors conclude, “IAM is a necessary but insufficient technology to protect identities as threat actors weaponize compromised identities and their protections to unleash havoc on organizations. All organizations need to revisit their security posture for identities, ensuring the right technologies are deployed, processes are brought to maturity, and elevated protections operationalized.”
You can read more on the Silverfort blog.
Image credit: Ruslan Batiuk / Dreamstime.com
