Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM) involves identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks associated with user identities in a network. By implementing IASM, organizations can systematically thwart attack opportunities, prevent the progression of breaches, and build greater resilience against cyber threats.
Identity Attack Surface Management: A Brief Overview
What Is the Identity Attack Surface?
The identity attack surface is all elements of a company’s IT environment that require authentication and authorization for gaining access to resources. It represents all potential entry points that malicious actors can exploit through compromised credentials.
As organizations grow and connect more systems to the public internet, managing their identity attack surface can create security gaps. Some common issues that increase risk include:
- Poorly managed access rights
- Inactive or dormant accounts
- Redundant permissions
Some common identity risks include:
- Malicious actors gaining unauthorized system access
- Users having more access than necessary which gives malicious actors the ability to move across systems and networks more easily after they gain unauthorized access
- Stolen or leaked credentials that malicious actors can purchase on the dark web or illicit Telegram channels to gain unauthorized initial access more easily
What is Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM)?
Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM) is an advanced approach focusing on identity-specific risks. It involves continuous discovery, monitoring, and remediation for both human and non-human identities. Unlike traditional Attack Surface Management (ASM) that focuses on IT assets, IASM concentrates on vulnerabilities linked to identities.
Adopting IASM helps security teams understand their attack surface from a threat actor’s viewpoint across complex on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Some benefits of IASM include:
- Visibility into identity-related risks
- Control beyond traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) methods
- Insights into privileged accounts and excessive privileges
- Ability to mitigate security risks from dormant and compromised accounts
Why Reducing the Identity Attack Surface Matters
Reducing the identity attack surface enables security teams to identify and address security and compliance gaps faster, minimizing exposure to identity based attacks. Some specific reasons for reducing the identity attack surface include:
- Prioritizing high-risk identity-specific vulnerabilities, like compromised admin credentials
- Identifying identity-based threats in real-time to reduce the impact that malicious actors use of legitimate credentials for illegitimate purposes can have
- Improving security hygiene by focusing on addressing identity related misconfigurations and changing compromised credentials
Why is Identity Attack Surface Management Especially Relevant Now?
What Are the Core Capabilities of an Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM) Solution?
An IASM solution continuously discovers, monitors, and addresses risks related to identities. By integrating identity management with security controls, IASM enables security teams to monitor human and machine identities proactively.
The core capabilities that an IASM should have include:
- Identity discovery and mapping: Identifying shadow IT systems, orphaned accounts, and unauthorized cloud services to make identity relations clearer
- Risk prioritization and privilege analysis: highlighting excessive privileges and unintentional attack paths by analyzing permissions across various systems so security teams can enforce the principle of least privilege
- Continuous monitoring and drift detection: monitoring to address changes or inactive accounts that threat actors might exploit, including identity drift like unauthorized changes to account roles and permissions
- Threat prevention and response: integrating with the organization’s security systems, like security information and event management (SIEM) or extended detection and response (XDR) tools, to improve identity-based detections
Why is managing the identity attack surface difficult?
Managing human and non-human identities across complex environments consisting of on-premises data centers, public cloud resources, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications comes with the following challenges:
- Fragmented identity data: Identity data silos make it difficult to manage information across systems like Active Directory, Okta, and Office 365.
- Credential sprawl: Employees use unauthorized cloud services, bypassing identity management policies.
- Mapping identity attack surfaces: Insufficient logging can lead to missing active services accounts and create blind spots that threat actors can exploit.
- Managing non-human identities: Security teams lack a way to manage non-human accounts and identities, like service accounts, across diverse environments.
What are some IASM use cases?
Some typical use cases for an IASM solution include:
- Lifecycle management: Ensuring configurations and hygiene are consistent across all identity types to reduce threats.
- Policy enforcement: Applying security policies consistently across different resources to maintain alignment with existing security controls and reducing unauthorized access risk
- Risk assessment: Identifying exposed credentials, risky access patterns, and potential attack vectors
- Threat detection: Detecting dormant accounts, excessive privileges, and exposed credential across cloud services, SaaS applications, and development environments, like GitHub
- Anomaly monitoring: Detecting anomalous authentication requests and user behaviors to prevent unauthorized access and reduce identity-based threats
Flare and Identity Attack Surface Management
How does Flare monitor the identity attack surface?
Flare’s platform continuously monitors the clear deep and dark web as well as illicit Telegram channels, providing organizations with identity intelligence. Some key data that the platform uncovers includes:
- Names
- User IDs
- Email addresses
- Passwords
- Active session cookies
- Security questions
Why do security teams use Flare’s platform for identity attack surface threat intelligence?
As attackers increasingly target the identity attack surface, Flare’s external attack surface management (EASM) solution enables security teams to monitor all public-facing assets 24/7. Flare’s platform integrates into a security team’s workflows, including their SIEM, so that they can identify and mitigate risks arising from stolen and leaked credentials.
What are Flare’s key benefits for identity attack surface management?
- Relevant threat information: Cut through the noise and reduce alert fatigue by focusing on the threat information that matters most.
- Visibility: Map your attack surface for a real-time view of the external attack surface with insights into leaked or stolen credentials being sold on the dark web or illicit Telegram channels
- Proactive monitoring: Automate threat intelligence collections and integrate it into the security team’s workflows to reduce the impact of human error risks, like weak passwords used across personal and professional applications
Identity Attack Surface Management and Flare
The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Flare proactively identifies compromised and leaked credentials across source code, dark web forums, illicit Telegram channels, and anonymous sharing sites to help security teams rapidly mitigate identity-based risks and reduce the identity attack surface.
Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. Learn more by signing up for our free trial.
