Identity Attack Surface
Identity Attack Surface refers to the aggregate collection of all active digital identities, credentials, permissions, and access points within an organization that can be exploited by cybercriminals. Unlike the traditional network attack surface, which focuses on servers, ports, and firewalls, the identity attack surface centers on "who" (or "what") has access to data.
In modern cybersecurity, the identity attack surface is often described as the "new perimeter." With the rise of cloud computing and remote work, protecting physical infrastructure is no longer sufficient; security teams must protect the identities—both human and machine—that facilitate access to critical resources.
Core Components of the Identity Attack Surface
The identity attack surface comprises distinct elements, often categorized by the type of entity that holds the access.
Human Identities
These are accounts tied to real people within the organization.
Employee Accounts: Standard corporate logins for email, workstations, and internal portals.
Privileged Users: Administrators and executives who hold elevated access rights, making them high-value targets.
Third-Party Users: Contractors, vendors, and partners who are granted temporary or permanent access to corporate systems.
Customer Identities: Accounts created by external customers (CIAM), which, if compromised, can lead to fraud and data theft.
Machine (Non-Human) Identities
These are automated accounts used by software to communicate with other software. They frequently outnumber human identities and are often less strictly monitored.
Service Accounts: Accounts used by applications to run automated tasks or scripts.
API Keys & Tokens: Secrets used to authenticate integrations between software platforms.
Bots and RPA: Robotic Process Automation bots that perform repetitive tasks, often requiring access to sensitive data.
Cloud Workloads: Serverless functions, containers, and virtual machines that possess their own identity and permissions to access cloud resources.
Why the Identity Attack Surface Is a Critical Risk
The identity attack surface has become the primary vector for modern cyberattacks due to several converging factors:
Credential Sprawl: The average employee manages dozens of passwords for various SaaS applications, leading to password reuse and "shadow identities" (accounts created without IT knowledge).
Excessive Permissions: Users and machines are often granted "standing privileges" (24/7 access) that exceed what they actually need to perform their jobs.
Lack of Visibility: Security teams often lack a centralized view of every identity, especially machine identities created dynamically in DevOps environments.
Bypassing Traditional Defenses: A valid identity allows an attacker to bypass firewalls and intrusion detection systems because the traffic appears legitimate.
Common Identity-Based Threats
When the identity attack surface is not properly managed, it exposes the organization to specific types of attacks:
Credential Stuffing: Attackers use automated tools to test millions of username/password pairs stolen from other breaches against login portals.
Account Takeover (ATO): A criminal gains unauthorized access to a legitimate user's account to steal data or launch further attacks.
Lateral Movement: Once an attacker compromises a low-level identity, they leverage its permissions to move deeper into the network.
Privilege Escalation: Attackers exploit misconfigurations to grant a compromised low-level account administrative rights.
Best Practices for Reducing Identity Risk
Organizations can shrink their identity attack surface through specific governance and technical controls:
Identity and Access Management (IAM): Implementing centralized solutions to manage user lifecycles and enforce strong authentication policies.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Requiring a second form of verification for all access requests to neutralize the risk of stolen passwords.
Least Privilege Access: Granting users and machines only the minimum level of access required for their specific role and for a limited time (Just-In-Time access).
Regular Access Reviews: Periodically auditing user entitlements to remove dormant accounts and revoke unnecessary permissions.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Identity Attack Surface differ from Traditional Attack Surface? The traditional attack surface focuses on infrastructure vulnerabilities (unpatched servers, open ports). The identity attack surface focuses on authentication and authorization vulnerabilities (weak passwords, over-privileged accounts).
Why are Non-Human Identities dangerous? Non-human identities (like API keys) often have high privileges, do not use MFA, and are frequently hardcoded into scripts or code repositories where they can be accidentally exposed to the public.
What is Shadow Identity? Shadow Identity refers to user accounts and credentials created by employees on third-party SaaS applications without the knowledge or oversight of the IT department. These unmanaged accounts create blind spots in the security posture.
Can an Identity Attack Surface be completely eliminated? No. As long as users and machines need access to data to function, the surface will exist. The goal is to minimize the surface by reducing unnecessary access and hardening the remaining identities against compromise.
Managing the Identity Attack Surface with ThreatNG
ThreatNG addresses the Identity Attack Surface by transforming scattered data points—such as usernames, domain registrations, and exposed technical configurations—into a cohesive risk profile. By correlating external infrastructure vulnerabilities with digital identity footprints, the solution allows organizations to protect not just their servers, but the people and credentials that access them.
External Discovery of Identity Infrastructure
ThreatNG performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery to map the digital ecosystem surrounding an organization's identities. Unlike internal scanners that require permissions, ThreatNG operates from the perspective of an adversary, identifying where digital identities interact with the public internet.
Shadow Identity Detection: The solution identifies unknown subdomains and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) that employees may have spun up without IT oversight. These "Shadow IT" assets often contain hardcoded credentials or unmanaged administrative interfaces that serve as open doors for identity theft.
Asset Attribution: By mapping subdomains and SaaS applications, ThreatNG helps correlate specific assets to the departments or individuals responsible for them, effectively linking infrastructure risk back to identity owners.
External Assessment of Identity Risks
ThreatNG conducts deep-dive assessments to identify specific technical flaws that attackers exploit to compromise identities. These assessments produce security ratings that quantify the risk level of the identity attack surface.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility This assessment evaluates the risk of session hijacking, where an attacker steals a user's active session cookie to impersonate them.
Mechanism: ThreatNG scans subdomains for the presence of critical security headers like Content-Security-Policy (CSP), HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), and X-Frame-Options.
Identity Impact: If a portal used by employees scores an "F" due to missing CSP headers, it is vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). An attacker can inject a script to exfiltrate session tokens, effectively bypassing passwords and MFA to take over the user's identity.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility This check identifies "dangling" DNS records that point to unclaimed third-party services.
Mechanism: The system performs DNS enumeration to find CNAME records pointing to services like GitHub, Heroku, or Shopify, and cross-references them against a comprehensive vendor list to see if the resource is unclaimed.
Identity Impact: Attackers hunt for these abandoned subdomains to host realistic-looking phishing pages on the company's own domain (e.g.,
login.company.com). Because the domain is legitimate, employees trust it and readily hand over their credentials, leading to immediate identity compromise.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Business Email Compromise (BEC) is the direct exploitation of trusted identities.
Mechanism: ThreatNG analyzes email security configurations (DMARC, SPF, DKIM) and identifies lookalike domains.
Identity Impact: It highlights weaknesses that allow attackers to spoof executive identities. If an organization lacks strict DMARC enforcement, an attacker can send emails that appear to come directly from the CEO, manipulating employees into transferring funds or revealing sensitive data.
Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure Machine identities (API keys, service accounts) are a rapidly growing part of the attack surface.
Mechanism: Through its "Sensitive Code Exposure" assessment, ThreatNG scans public repositories and pages for leaked secrets.
Identity Impact: Discovering a hardcoded AWS key in a public script is equivalent to finding a master key. It allows attackers to assume the identity of a privileged service and perform administrative actions without ever interacting with a human user.
Investigation Modules for Identity Verification
ThreatNG enables security teams to pivot from high-level risks to specific identity investigations using targeted modules.
Username Exposure Investigation This module validates the presence of specific handles across a vast array of platforms, moving beyond simple enumeration to risk analysis.
Scope: It checks social media, coding repositories, and even high-risk categories like adult or dating sites.
Application: If a corporate handle (e.g.,
company_dev_team) is found on a third-party code-sharing site, analysts can immediately investigate if proprietary code is being shared publicly.
Social Media and Reddit Discovery These modules manage "Narrative Risk" by monitoring public conversations that may indicate an impending attack on specific personnel.
Narrative Analysis: By monitoring mentions of executive names or handle variations on platforms like Reddit, the system can detect doxxing campaigns or coordinated harassment before they result in account compromise.
Domain Intelligence & Permutations This module identifies proactive threats to brand and employee identity integrity.
Typosquatting Detection: It discovers registered domains that mimic legitimate naming conventions (e.g.,
company-support.com).Identity Defense: By flagging these domains early, security teams can block them before they are used in spear-phishing campaigns targeting specific employees.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
ThreatNG enriches identity findings by cross-referencing them with DarCache, its proprietary repository of dark web and breach data.
Breach Correlation: When a username is discovered, DarCache Rupture checks if it has appeared in historical data breaches.
Ransomware Context: DarCache Ransomware analyzes if the organization's sector or supply chain partners (and their associated identities) are currently being targeted by specific ransomware groups.
Dark Web Monitoring: DarCache Dark Web scans hidden services for mentions of specific employee emails or handles, acting as an early warning system for targeted credential theft.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
Identity risk is dynamic; a secure account today can be compromised tomorrow.
Continuous Surveillance: ThreatNG monitors the external environment 24/7. It triggers alerts when new risks emerge, such as a new typosquatted domain appearing or a previously secure subdomain losing its SSL configuration.
Actionable Reporting: Executive and Technical reports map findings to specific identity risks. A report might detail that while the primary domain is secure, a marketing subdomain is vulnerable to takeover, posing a phishing risk to customer identities.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG acts as a force multiplier when paired with other identity and access management (IAM) or open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools. It provides the "Risk Context" that standalone tools often lack.
Enhancing Identity Access Management (IAM)
Workflow: An IAM solution manages internal policy and permissions. ThreatNG complements this by validating the external posture of those identities.
Example: While an IAM tool ensures an employee has the right internal access, ThreatNG verifies that the employee hasn't inadvertently exposed those credentials on a public Trello board or GitHub gist.
Augmenting Username Enumeration Tools
Workflow: Tools specifically designed for username enumeration (like Sherlock) excel at finding where a handle exists. ThreatNG takes that list of "found" accounts and assesses the infrastructure behind them.
Example: If a reconnaissance tool finds a developer's username on a niche coding forum, ThreatNG can be used to scan that forum's domain for "Web Application Hijack Susceptibility." If the forum is insecure, ThreatNG highlights the risk that the developer's account—and any shared code—could be compromised via XSS or session hijacking.
Validating Threat Intelligence Feeds
Workflow: Threat intelligence feeds provide raw data on potential threats. ThreatNG validates whether those threats are relevant to the organization's specific identity footprint.
Example: A feed might report a rise in phishing attacks targeting the finance sector. ThreatNG complements this by specifically scanning for newly registered domains that mimic the organization's CFO or finance department, moving from general intelligence to targeted defense.
