Unmanaged Shadow Identity
The term Unmanaged Shadow Identity in the context of cybersecurity refers to an identity, account, or credential that exists within an organization's systems or is connected to its resources but is not under the official control, governance, or security monitoring of the organization's Identity and Access Management (IAM) infrastructure or IT administration team.
Detailed Definition and Characteristics
A Shadow Identity is often created outside standard provisioning processes, leaving it "unmanaged" and posing significant security risks. It typically exhibits the following characteristics:
1. Creation Outside of Official Processes
Unmanaged Shadow Identities are usually created ad hoc by individuals or automated systems for specific, immediate needs. Examples include:
Developer Backdoors: A developer creates a hardcoded administrative account for quick troubleshooting or maintenance access.
Legacy System Accounts: An account on an old server that was never decommissioned or integrated into the modern identity management system.
Third-Party Credentials: Credentials generated by a cloud service provider or a business partner's tool that grant access to internal resources but bypass internal provisioning workflows.
Unsanctioned Cloud Service Accounts: An employee signing up for a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application using their corporate email, granting the service access to data without IT oversight (often part of Shadow IT).
2. Lack of Centralized Governance
The key problem is the absence of centralized control. These identities are not subjected to the regular security hygiene applied to managed accounts:
No Lifecycle Management: They are never reviewed, audited, suspended, or de-provisioned when the associated user or service leaves the organization or the business need expires.
Weak Password Policies: Passwords for these accounts may be weak, never changed, or even hardcoded into applications, as they are not enforced by single sign-on (SSO) or corporate password policies.
Unverified Permissions: The permissions granted to the Shadow Identity are often overly broad or administrative in nature and are not regularly reviewed in accordance with the principle of least privilege.
3. High Security Risk and Attack Surface
Unmanaged Shadow Identities represent a critical vulnerability for the organization because they significantly expand the attack surface while simultaneously reducing visibility.
Blind Spots: Security teams are unaware of their existence, meaning they cannot monitor their activity for suspicious behavior or include them in vulnerability scanning.
Lateral Movement: If an attacker compromises a user's machine, they can often discover and use a weak, unmanaged local or service account to gain higher privileges or move laterally across the network without tripping alarms.
Persistence: They are ideal for threat actors seeking to maintain persistence, as they are unlikely to be discovered or deactivated during standard forensic or cleanup operations following an initial breach.
In essence, an Unmanaged Shadow Identity is a ghost in the machine—a functioning key to the organization's digital assets that the security team doesn't know exists, cannot track, and therefore cannot protect.
ThreatNG is designed to provide an attacker's view of an organization’s digital footprint, making it highly effective at locating and mitigating the security risks posed by Unmanaged Shadow Identities. It addresses the core problem of identities and assets existing outside of an organization’s internal security controls by continuously scanning the external environment.
External Discovery and Attack Surface Mapping
ThreatNG’s external discovery module systematically scours the public internet, code repositories, cloud configuration files, domain registration data, and dark web forums. The primary goal is to find assets and identities that IT and security teams are unaware of.
For Unmanaged Shadow Identities, this process involves:
Domain and Subdomain Scraping: Finding forgotten or unsanctioned staging servers, testing environments, and unlisted applications that contain administrative user accounts or service credentials.
Public Code Repository Monitoring: Identifying exposed API keys, database connection strings, and hardcoded credentials accidentally committed to public platforms like GitHub or GitLab. These strings function as Shadow Identities, providing unauthorized access to back-end systems.
Credential Leak Detection: Proactively searching paste sites and dark web markets for corporate email addresses or usernames paired with passwords that may be from old, non-SSO-compliant systems. For example, discovering a list of login credentials for a deprecated customer portal that was never decommissioned, where the accounts were never removed from the organization's user directory.
External Assessment and Risk Analysis
Once a Shadow Identity is discovered, ThreatNG’s external assessment module immediately analyzes its potential risk profile. This moves beyond simple discovery to determine the exploitability and potential impact of the exposure.
Highlight and Examples in Great Detail:
Exposure Assessment of Keys and Tokens:
Example: ThreatNG discovers an AWS access key exposed in a public repository. The assessment module doesn't just note the key's existence; it attempts to determine what permissions the key has (e.g., read-only, full administrative access to S3 buckets, or permission to spawn new cloud resources). If the key grants global administrative privileges, the assessment provides a Critical risk score, flagging it as an administrative Shadow Identity that allows an attacker to control the cloud environment.
Vulnerability and Configuration Assessment of Associated Assets:
Example: A discovered Shadow Identity is a local administrative account on a publicly accessible server. The assessment module checks the server for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. If the server is running an outdated, unpatched version of SSH or the administrative login page lacks multi-factor authentication, the risk of that Shadow Identity being compromised rises dramatically. The assessment highlights that the identity is not only unmanaged but also sits on a vulnerable access point, such as a server that is two major operating system patch versions behind.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
ThreatNG enforces the duty of care by providing a mechanism for sustained, prudent oversight.
Continuous Monitoring: The platform continuously rescans for previously mitigated Shadow Identities that may reappear and hunts for new ones. For instance, if an exposed API key is revoked, ThreatNG monitors to ensure a functionally identical replacement key is not created and exposed in a new location. It ensures that the remediation action is effective and persistent over time.
Reporting: ThreatNG provides clear, actionable reports that transform technical findings into a business-risk context. These reports highlight which critical assets are vulnerable to specific Shadow Identities, allowing directors and officers to make informed decisions about resource allocation and to demonstrate to regulators that an effective risk management process is in place.
Investigation Modules and Intelligence Repositories
These two modules work together to contextualize a discovered Shadow Identity and facilitate its removal.
Intelligence Repositories
This module provides a comprehensive dataset of historical breaches, known threat actors, and standard attack methodologies. It is used to enrich the data on a discovered Shadow Identity.
Example: When ThreatNG finds a corporate email and password combination on the dark web, the intelligence repository immediately cross-references that password against known passwords used by a specific state-sponsored threat group, confirming not only that the credential has been leaked but also that high-priority adversaries are actively circulating it.
Investigation Modules
This module allows security analysts to drill down and attribute the Shadow Identity to an internal source or breach.
Highlight and Examples in Great Detail:
Attribution and Impact Analysis:
Example: An investigation is launched after ThreatNG finds a long-term service account credential exposed in a data breach dump. The investigation module correlates the identifier (e.g., the service account name) with internal records to determine which internal application, team, and server uses that credential. This allows the organization to rapidly scope the potential compromise, identify all dependent systems, and immediately rotate the secret across the entire environment.
Root Cause Analysis for Recurrence:
Example: A specific type of internal-facing development token keeps appearing in public code repositories. The investigation module helps to map the typical characteristics of these leaks (e.g., all tokens are generated by a specific internal script or developer workstation). By tracing the pattern of the Shadow Identity creation, the team can address the flawed internal process—such as a lack of code review or automated secret scanning—which is the root cause of the identity exposure.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG’s external focus and high-fidelity findings are most potent when its intelligence is fed into existing internal security infrastructure, allowing for rapid automated action.
Cooperation with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms:
Example: If ThreatNG detects a highly privileged Shadow Identity credential on a paste site, it triggers an automated playbook within the SOAR platform. This playbook immediately executes a sequence of actions: first, it verifies the exposure; second, it generates a high-priority ticket; and third, it sends a direct command to the organization's Identity Provider (IdP) to revoke all associated access tokens and force a password reset for the linked internal user account, minimizing the time an attacker has to use the compromised identity.
Cooperation with Internal Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems:
Example: ThreatNG identifies an unsanctioned cloud-based API access key (a Shadow Identity) that has not been used in ninety days. ThreatNG sends an alert containing the key identifier to the IAM governance module. The IAM system then automatically flags the key for deletion or adds it to a review queue, ensuring that stale and unnecessary Shadow Identities are removed and shrinking the organization's overall attack surface.
Cooperation with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems:
Example: ThreatNG discovers an exposed username and password on the dark web. The SIEM immediately ingests this information. The SIEM then uses this credential information as a watch list and cross-references it against all login attempts over the past week. Suppose the SIEM sees a log-in attempt from an unusual geographic location using that exposed credential. In that case, it triggers an instant, high-confidence alert, confirming that the Shadow Identity has become an active threat.
