What is an Identity Security Breach?

In the context of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), an Identity Security Breach refers to an unauthorized access, exposure, or misuse of identities, credentials, or sensitive data related to identity management systems and processes. An Identity Security Breach compromises the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of user identities, roles, and access rights within an organization’s IT architecture.

Causes of an Identity Security Breach

Unauthorized Access

Malicious actors exploit vulnerabilities in an organization’s IGA system to gain access to an employee, contractor, partner, or vendor user account or sensitive user identity data without proper authorization.

Identity Theft

Cyber criminals impersonate legitimate users by stealing credentials or leveraging compromised identity records.

Privilege Abuse

Administrators, database administrators, network engineers, and others that have elevated permissions to resources may misuse assigned permissions. For example, an employee that accesses or modifies data or applications beyond their role requirements.

Compromised Access Controls

Weak enforcement of access policies like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Segregation of Duties (SoD) that result in orphan, dormant, or unused accounts or toxic combinations (conflicting permissions).

Data Leaks

Exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) stored within identity repositories due to misconfigurations or weak security controls.

Examples of an Identity Security Breach

Stolen Credentials

Attackers bypass an organization’s authentication mechanisms to access critical systems and steal usernames and passwords.

Hacking Inactive Accounts with Access Rights

When former employee, contractor, partner, or vendor accounts are not deactivated when access is no longer required, malicious actors gain access to steal sensitive data undetected.

Misconfigured Access Rights

When administrators do not set up access rights properly, users are assigned higher permissions than they need and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Insider Threats

Employees or contractors create either intentional malicious threats or negligent threats such as a vulnerability that arises from careless or unintentional actions, such as weak passwords, to exploit access privileges and steal data or make it easy for hackers to misuse.

Consequences of an Identity Security Breach

Regulatory Non-Compliance

Violations of regulations like HIPAA, or SOX.

Operational Disruption

An Identity Security Breach can lead to downtime, data loss, and damage to business processes.

Reputation Damage

Loss of trust from customers and other stakeholders.

Financial Impact

Fines, penalties, and costs related to incident response and recovery.

Strategies to Stop an Identity Security Breach

Effective Identity Lifecycle Management

Manage the entire lifecycle of user, machine, and AI-generated identities within an organization to ensure that employees, partners, contractors, vendors and systems have a level of access to sensitive data and applications sufficient to fulfill their roles at every stage of their relationship with the organization, including when they join, when their responsibilities change, and when they leave the organization.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Restrict users’ access to resources based on the roles assigned to them within an organization. Rather than assigning permissions to individual users, permissions are grouped by role, and users are assigned to roles that determine what actions they can perform and which resources they can access within an IT infrastructure.

Access Certifications and Reviews

Verify appropriate user access rights to detect anomalies and ensure ongoing security and compliance using a simple and efficient process that does not create unnecessary burden on the business or the user experience.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Adds additional layers of security to verify user identities before granting access to reduce credential-based attacks. Require users to complete multiple steps before being granted access to internal resources, applications, or data. MFA may be executed in a combination of something a user knows like a username/password combination, or the answer to a personal question, something they are like a fingerprint or retina scan, or something they have like a push sent to a mobile device, or a onetime passcode (OTP).

Monitoring and Analytics

Ensures the continuous monitoring of access activities to detect and respond to unauthorized actions and unusual behaviors, such as login anomalies and privilege escalation and generate reports to demonstrate regulatory compliance.

Privileged Access Management (PAM)

Use strict controls and session monitoring to secure, monitor, and manage access to critical systems, applications, and sensitive information by privileged users or accounts.

Where to Learn More

A SaaS-based IGA solution like Omada Identity Cloud delivers complete visibility and control over your identity landscape to mitigate the threats of an Identity Security Breach. Leveraging real-time data processing, Omada Identity Cloud provides unparalleled insights and analytics to streamline the entire identity lifecycle, bolster security, and optimize efficiency. Get a demo.