Identity Threat Detection & Response: Stop Attacks Before They Escalate

Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) is a cybersecurity discipline that deals with monitoring access activity, detecting unusual behavior, alerting admins of potential threats and autonomously responding to attacks.

With its focus on real-time visibility and proactive detection, ITDR marks an important paradigm shift. Until now, the main goal of Identity Security was to minimize the risk of a successful attack through strong authentication and Least Privilege access. However, prevention alone is no longer enough to keep up with the growing number of identity-based attacks organizations face every day.

Even when organizations follow best practices for authentication and access control, sooner or later an attacker will make it past their defenses. And when they do, Identity Threat Detection & Response now allows organizations to identify attacks as they happen and prevent further damage.

The term Identity Security is used to highlight how the field has advanced beyond traditional Identity & Access Management. The detection and response capabilities provided by ITDR complement the well established risk mitigation strategies central to Identity Governance & Administration as well as Access Management.

Secure authentication acts as your first line of defense, while lifecycle management and access reviews reduce the risk and blast radius of compromised accounts. The real-time visibility offered by ITDR further enhances security by giving organizations actionable insights into threats on their network. This allows security teams to stop attacks before they can escalate further.

The number of identity-based attacks organizations face has been rising for years. Now that cybercriminals are integrating new technologies such as generative AI into their playbooks, this trend has only accelerated further. The result is a daily barrage of phishing emails, password spraying, deepfakes and social engineering.

Cybersecurity experts have long stressed that in today’s threat landscape, it is no longer a question of if your network will be breached – only when. No form of prevention offers 100% security. This means organizations need to plan ahead and prepare their defenses for the worst case scenario of a successful breach.

Identity Threat Detection & Response provides critical visibility into what is happening on your network. While traditional governance seeks to minimize risk through best practice approaches to access control and privilege management, ITDR shows you what users are doing in real time. This allows organizations to detect and respond to suspicious activity, such as spikes in login attempts or unusual access patterns.

ITDR and Identity Governance form two central pillars of Identity Security, an approach to cybersecurity that aims to protect organizations from all manner of identity-based risks. While these disciplines complement each other and are best used in combination, there are important differences to be aware of.

Although both use real-time analytics to detect threats, ITDR and EDR differ slightly in terms of their focus and scope:

Much like ITDR, Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) is designed to help organizations analyze event data and act on potential threats. However, SIEM is positioned more broadly as centralized aggregator for all kinds of event logs.

Attackers move fast. The moment they make it past your defenses, they run through a sophisticated playbook designed to achieve three things: expand their level of control, cover their tracks and establish persistent access to your network.

During a breach, every second counts when it comes to preventing further damage. This makes real-time visibility through continuous event monitoring an essential piece of modern cybersecurity. ITDR enables rapid response and allows you to identify and stop threats as they happen.

On top of that, event monitoring and logging provides important forensic data that organizations rely on not only during their initial investigation but also when they have to rebuild following an attack.

Event monitoring platforms need to filter through an enormous amount of event data. Finding and highlighting important events among the background noise of normal IT operations can be akin to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

ITDR platforms offer different methods to help admins filter through event data, such as activity dashboards or customizable thresholds for specific event types (like failed logins). However, not every security incident follows such a clear pattern.

To expand its detection capabilities when it comes to user behavior, ITDR utilizes machine learning algorithms to identify suspicious activity. It does this by first using User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to establish a baseline of normal user behavior it can contrast unexpected actions against.

For example, when a user who normally accesses around 50 files per day as part of their job suddenly begins to copy thousands of files from all sorts of directories, ITDR would flag this unusual behavior.

To ensure that security teams can respond quickly to ongoing threats, ITDR notifies them of any suspicious activity it detects. Alert thresholds and workflows need to be highly customizable in order to integrate smoothly with an organization’s security program.

Not only do security teams need to be able to select which event types and patterns should trigger different alert levels, ITDR also needs to support different notification channels such as email and text in order to reliably reach security staff during a crisis.

As attack chains become increasingly automated, so too must the security response. On top of alerting security teams of suspicious activity, ITDR can take many automated actions to prevent further damage until an admin can look into the situation.

Automated responses can range from terminating an active session, locking an account or even revoking access to specific resources. The goal is to stop attackers in their tracks by reacting to signs of compromise in seconds – far quicker than any human ever could.

With identity-based threats on the rise, threat detection and response has become an essential piece of any successful Identity Security strategy. Organizations need real-time visibility into identity events to stop attackers and insider threats before they can cause catastrophic damage.

One challenge with integrating ITDR into your security framework is the fact that event monitoring suites often live in separate platforms than an organization’s governance toolset. Yet no integration with governance and administration tools means that detection platforms are limited in their response capabilities – relying on admins to take action based on their findings.

But what if there was a governance solution that combined automated administration and in-depth visibility? With our no-code IGA solution tenfold, we have developed just that. In just one solution, tenfold provides you:

Although tenfold does not include all the features you would expect from a dedicated ITDR solution, the benefit of combining all these capabilities in a single platform makes it a lean and efficient tool for controlling identities, especially for smaller to mid-sized organizations.

To learn more about how tenfold unites governance and observability in a single platform, book a personal demo with one of our team today!