NHI Email Roles

In the context of cybersecurity, NHI Email Roles refers to the categorization of email addresses associated with Non-Human Identities (NHIs) based on their specific function or purpose within an organization's systems. These email addresses are not for individual people but are used by automated processes, services, or technical accounts.

The "roles" are typically identified by the email address's prefix or full name, which indicates the purpose of the NHI. Examples of these roles include:

• Administrative & Security Roles: admin@, security@, sysadmin@ — These are often associated with NHIs that have privileged access and are used for critical administrative tasks, security alerts, or system maintenance.

• Operational & Service Roles: ops@, service@, svc@, support@ — These emails belong to NHIs that handle day-to-day operations, service interactions, or provide support functions for other systems.

• Development & Integration Roles: devops@, jenkins@, git@, integration@ — These roles are typical in modern development environments, representing NHIs that manage code repositories, continuous integration pipelines, and other automated development workflows.

• System & Automation Roles: system@, automation@, test@, info@ — NHIs use these for general system functions, automated scripts, testing, or providing general information.

The detailed definition of NHI Email Roles is crucial for cybersecurity because it allows security teams to:

• Identify and Prioritize Risk: An exposed email address like admin@ or jenkins@ poses a much higher risk than one like info@, as it likely represents a more privileged NHI.

• Improve Threat Intelligence: Understanding the roles of exposed NHIs helps in anticipating how an attacker might use them. For instance, compromising an email associated with a DevOps role could lead to a supply chain attack.

• Enhance Governance: It enables organizations to apply specific security policies and monitoring to NHIs based on their function, ensuring that highly sensitive roles are more tightly controlled.

By defining and categorizing NHI Email Roles, security professionals can move beyond simply identifying exposed emails to understanding the potential impact and prioritizing their mitigation efforts effectively.

ThreatNG, an external attack surface management, digital risk protection, and security ratings solution, would significantly help an organization manage its NHI Email Roles by focusing on their external visibility and potential vulnerabilities. It does this by providing a comprehensive, outside-in view of the organization's digital footprint where these specific non-human identities (NHIs) might be exposed.

ThreatNG's Role in Managing NHI Email Roles:

1. External Discovery: ThreatNG performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery to find email addresses associated with NHI roles. These emails are often found in public or externally accessible locations. ThreatNG's capabilities help with discovery in the following ways:

• Domain Intelligence: Its Email Intelligence capabilities discover harvested emails and analyze a domain’s records, which can expose NHI emails. ThreatNG can also find email addresses and related information through its WHOIS Intelligence.

• Search Engine Exploitation: ThreatNG identifies emails referenced in files such as robots.txt and security.txt. These files often contain emails for administrative or security roles that may be associated with NHIs.

• Archived Web Pages: ThreatNG finds emails that have been archived on an organization’s online presence.

• Online Sharing Exposure: Emails associated with NHI roles might be discovered within online code-sharing platforms like Pastebin or GitHub Gist.

Example of External Discovery Helping with NHI Email Roles: ThreatNG's Domain Intelligence discovers the email address devops-team@example.com during a DNS analysis. An NHI uses this email to manage a CI/CD pipeline. By identifying this email, ThreatNG pinpoints a potential point of exposure for a critical NHI role.

2. External Assessment: ThreatNG's assessments help an organization understand the specific risks associated with discovered NHI Email Roles:

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment considers Domain Intelligence (including DNS Intelligence and Email Intelligence) and Dark Web Presence (Compromised Credentials). ThreatNG's analysis of an NHI email's security presence (DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records) helps determine how susceptible it is to being spoofed for phishing attacks.

• Example: ThreatNG assesses that security@example.com, an NHI email for automated alerts, lacks a DMARC record. This weakness contributes to a higher "BEC & Phishing Susceptibility" score, as an attacker could easily spoof this email to send fake security notifications to employees.

• Data Leak Susceptibility: This assessment is based on external attack surface intelligence, including Dark Web Presence (Compromised Credentials) and Domain Intelligence (which includes Email Intelligence). If ThreatNG finds a specific NHI email role in a list of compromised credentials on the dark web, it indicates a high risk of a data leak.

• Code Secret Exposure: ThreatNG discovers public code repositories and investigates their contents for sensitive data. NHI Email Roles or credentials associated with them can be hard-coded in these repositories, directly contributing to this exposure.

• Example: A code repository scan reveals api-access@example.com (an NHI role) embedded in a configuration file along with a plaintext API key. This contributes to a "Code Secret Exposure" score, highlighting a critical risk.

• Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates an organization's mobile apps for the presence of access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers. This can uncover NHI email roles embedded within the application's code for backend services or API access.

3. Reporting: ThreatNG provides various reports, including Executive, Technical, and Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational). These reports would detail all identified NHI Email Roles, their locations (e.g., in a public DNS record or a code repository), and their associated risk levels based on ThreatNG’s assessments.

Example of Reporting Helping with NHI Email Roles: A Technical Report from ThreatNG would list the NHI email role 

admin-api@example.com found in a publicly exposed code repository as a "High" priority risk. The report would include the specific reasoning and recommendations for remediation.

4. Continuous Monitoring: ThreatNG continuously monitors the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings of all organizations. This is vital for NHI Email Roles because it allows for:

• Proactive Detection: ThreatNG detects new NHI email roles in public sources, including code pushes and DNS record changes.

• Real-time Risk Updates: If an NHI email role is suddenly found in a new dark web dump, ThreatNG's continuous monitoring would update the risk rating in real-time.

Example of Continuous Monitoring Helping with NHI Email Roles: An organization's new automation-alerts@example.com email is inadvertently published in a misconfigured configuration file. ThreatNG's continuous monitoring quickly detects this new exposure and immediately alerts the security team, preventing the NHI email from becoming a long-term blind spot.

5. Investigation Modules: ThreatNG's investigation modules provide the tools to deep dive into NHI Email Roles:

• Domain Intelligence: Its Email Intelligence capability finds harvested emails and analyzes their security posture. This module would allow an investigator to look into the specifics of a discovered NHI email role.

• Sensitive Code Exposure: This module is explicitly designed to find code repositories and investigate their contents for sensitive data. This is the primary location for finding NHI Email Roles that have been hard-coded or leaked in development environments.

• Mobile Application Discovery: This module discovers mobile apps and their contents, including access and security credentials, which may be associated with NHI Email Roles.

• Dark Web Presence: The Dark Web Presence module finds compromised credentials and organizational mentions on the dark web, directly helping to identify if an NHI Email Role has been compromised.

Example of Investigation Modules Helping with NHI Email Roles: An investigation using the "Sensitive Code Exposure" module reveals that jenkins-build@example.com (an NHI email role) is present in a publicly accessible Jenkins credentials file. This allows the security team to pinpoint the exact location and context of the exposed NHI email role for remediation.

6. Intelligence Repositories (DarCache): ThreatNG's continuously updated intelligence repositories provide critical context for NHI Email Roles:

• Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): This repository is a direct source of information on compromised credentials. If an NHI email role is part of a newly discovered data breach, this repository would contain that information, providing immediate actionable intelligence.

• Mobile Apps (DarCache Mobile): This repository indicates if access credentials or security credentials, which could include NHI emails, are present within mobile apps.

Example of Intelligence Repositories Helping with NHI Email Roles: DarCache Rupture flags db-sync@example.com (an NHI email role) as part of a list of compromised credentials recently found on the dark web. This allows the organization to immediately invalidate any credentials associated with this NHI email and investigate further.

Synergies with Complementary Solutions:

Other security solutions can powerfully complement ThreatNG's external focus on NHI Email Roles:

• Complementary Solutions: Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) Systems: ThreatNG's discovery of exposed NHI Email Roles provides crucial external visibility. An IAM system can use this information to ensure these NHIs are properly governed, and a PAM solution can enforce stricter controls like just-in-time access or mandatory credential rotation for highly privileged NHI roles.

• Complementary Solutions: Email Security Gateways (ESG) and DMARC/SPF/DKIM Management Tools: ThreatNG's Email Intelligence, which assesses the security presence of discovered emails, can provide valuable data to these solutions. Suppose ThreatNG finds an NHI email role with a weak security configuration. In that case, the ESG can be configured to block emails spoofing that address, and the DMARC/SPF/DKIM management tool can be used to strengthen the email authentication records.

• Complementary Solutions: Secrets Management Solutions: ThreatNG's discovery of NHI Email Roles and their associated credentials in public code repositories provides concrete evidence for the need to use a secrets management solution. This allows organizations to move hard-coded NHI credentials into secure vaults, where they can be managed and rotated securely.

Complementary Solutions: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: ThreatNG's alerts on newly discovered NHI Email Exposure or compromised credentials can be ingested by a SIEM for consolidated logging. A SOAR platform could then use this information to automate response actions, such as isolating compromised assets or triggering a credential rotation process based on the detected risk.