Protecting Identity Becomes Pivotal in Stopping Cyberattacks

As today’s workplace transforms, data is no longer centralised and is spread across cloud,  increasing the attack surface. Attackers are constantly looking for vulnerabilities to exploit and searching for the Achilles heel in identity systems that could deliver them entry into your IT environment. Cyber actors are now using sophisticated methods to target Identity and access management infrastructure. Credential misuse is the most common attack method. According to Gartner, “Modern attacks have shown that identity hygiene is not enough to prevent breaches. Multifactor authentication and entitlement management can be circumvented, and they lack mechanisms for detection and response if something goes wrong.”  

Prioritize securing identity infrastructure with tools to monitor identity attack techniques, protect identity and access controls, detect when attacks are occurring, and enable fast remediation.

Zscaler ITDR detects credential theft and privilege misuse, attacks on Active Directory, and risky entitlements that create attack paths

With identity-based attacks on the rise, today’s businesses require the ability to detect when attackers exploit, misuse, or steal enterprise identities. Identifying and detecting identity-based threats is now crucial due to attackers' propensity of using credentials and Active Directory (AD) exploitation techniques for privilege escalations and for lateral movement across your environment.

 Zscaler ITDR helps you to thwart identity-based AD attacks in real-time and help you to gain actionable insight into gaps in your identity attack surface. The solution enables you to continuously monitor identities, provides visibility on misconfigurations/ risky permissions and detect identity-based attacks such as credential theft, multifactor authentication bypass, and privilege escalation.

Gain Full Visibility

Uncover blind spots and understand hidden vulnerabilities that leave your environment susceptible to identity-based attacks such as exposed surfaces, dormant credentials, and policy violations. 

Real-Time Identity Threat Detection and Response 

Zscaler Identity Protection uses identity threat detections and decoys that rise high fidelity alerts to help your security teams to swiftly remediate with targeted response. The same endpoint agent that runs deception also detects identity attacks on the endpoint. These include advanced attacks like DCSync, DCShadow, LDAP enumeration, session enumeration, Kerberoast attacks, and more.

Reduce Identity Risk

With deep visibility on identity context, Zscaler Identity Protection helps your security teams to identify, address, and purge compromised systems and exposed credentials quickly. Often, security teams struggle to collect context and correlations to investigate threats. Zscaler ITDR solves this problem by consolidating all risk signals, threats detected, failed posture checks , Okta metadata, and policy blocks (ZIA/ZPA) into a single view for each identity. You can now quickly investigate risky identities for indicators of compromise and potential exploitation.

Prevent Credential Misuse/Theft

Attackers use stolen credentials and attack Active Directory to escalate privileges to move laterally. Zscaler Identity Protection helps to detect credential exploits and prevent credential theft or misuse.

Spot Lateral Movement

Stop attackers who have gotten past perimeter-based defenses and are attempting to move laterally through your environment. Zscaler Deception ITDR enhances security by identifying misconfigurations and credential exposures that create attack paths for attackers to use for lateral movement.

Zscaler ITDR: Beyond just prevention – Monitor, detect, & respond to identity threats

Monitor: Identity systems are in constant flux with configuration and permissions changes. Get alerts when configuration changes introduce new risks. Organizations lack visibility into credential sprawl across their endpoint footprint, leaving them vulnerable to attackers who exploit these credentials to access sensitive data and apps. The solution is Zscaler ITDR, which audits all endpoints to identify credentials and other sensitive material in various sources such as files, registry, memory, cache, configuration files, credential managers, and browsers and gains visibility into endpoint credential exposure to identify lateral movement paths, enforcing policies, and cleaning up credentials to reduce the internal attack surface.

Detect: ITDR automatically surfaces hidden risks that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Zscaler ITDR pulls together all risk signals, threats detected, posture checks failed, metadata from Okta, and policy blocks from ZIA/ZPA into a single unified view to provide a complete picture of risk for an identity. This helps to identify & detect unmanaged identities, misconfigured settings, and even credential misuse.

Respond: ITDR spots attacks targeting your identity store, you can take immediate action. Restrict or terminate those identities causing trouble and shut down threats before they have a chance to wreak havoc.

Zscaler ITDR Benefits 

Minimize the Attack Surface

Reduce attack surface by gaining continuous visibility into the attack vectors and identity misconfigurations. Identify to stop adversarial advances—including ransomware attacks—in their tracks with traps set. 

Real-Time Identity Threat Detection

Thwart sophisticated attacks on Active Directory using identity threat detections on endpoints.

Accelerate Incident Response

Built-in threat detection and response speeds up threat detections and expands coverage to significantly reduce mean time to response (MTTR). ITDR helps security teams drive down their mean time to respond and prioritize what matters most by risk scoring.

Conclusion

No matter what – Breaches are inevitable, and preventative security measures aren’t sufficient to thwart them. Though staying upbeat while fighting cyberthreats, shrinking budgets, and staff turnover is a tall task, how we respond today dictates how we perform tomorrow. Choosing and adopting identity protection solutions like ITDR helps your company evolve its zero trust security and compliance posture in response to the changing threat landscape. Zscaler ITDR strengthens your zero trust posture by mitigating the risks of user compromise and privilege exploitation.