How To Manage Your Identity Attack Surface Effectively

Identity attacks have significantly increased over the years, often driven by gaps in identity systems that highlight the need for a new approach to identity protection. Enterprises depend on IAM, PAM, and IGA solutions to address the challenge, but these tools lack visibility and real-time contextual analysis of identity activities. They rely heavily on logs and focus narrowly on specific environments or identity systems themselves.

As identity and security professionals recognize the importance of closing the gaps and the urgency of reducing the potential identity attack surface, their biggest concern is often as plain as: “With all the tools I already have and the emergence of new ones, where do I even start?”

The newly released report “Securing the Identity Attack Surface: A Deep Dive into the New Battlefield of Identity Security” by Francis Odum at Software Analyst Cyber Research (SACR) addresses the challenge and outlines where we are today and three key components necessary for effectively monitoring, managing, and securing enterprises’ identity attack surfaces.

Why is the Identity Attack Surface “The Next Battlefront in Identity Security”?

Odum’s report paints a stark picture: identity has supplanted networks as the primary attack vector. Indeed, 90% of organizations experienced an identity-related breach in the past year, with 93% of those breaches being preventable through improved controls. 

In his report, Odum lists the challenges of effective identity attack surface management:

• Legacy Tool Silos: Existing IAM, IGA, and PAM solutions lack integration, creating silos and hindering effective identity protection efforts.
• Fragmented Identity Data: Incomplete normalization and correlation of identity data across systems weakens security posture and increases vulnerabilities.
• Evolving Attack Tactics: Attackers are bypassing traditional security controls, necessitating advanced identity protection measures.

These trends illustrate the urgent need for a new approach that unifies siloed solutions while addressing the invisible risks of identity sprawl, including NHIs and shadow IT.

Enter: Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM)

The report acknowledges the emergence of Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM) as a response to the growing realization of gaps within legacy identity vendors, stating that IASM aims “to provide enterprises with full visibility into their legacy identity stacks, enforce posture controls, protect identities, and drive remediation efforts based on informed insights.” 

Aiming to highlight that visibility, Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM), and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) are the key components of IASM, the report makes clear that they form the foundation of a resilient identity security strategy.

• Visibility ensures organizations fully understand their attack surface. It ensures continuous detection and monitoring of all identities, both human and machine (non-human), and maps relationships between identities, access privileges, and permissions. 
• ISPM enforces proper security hygiene to minimize risk. It helps ensure the identity landscape remains secure by detecting and minimizing misconfigurations, enforcing MFA and the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), eliminating over-provisioning, and managing and reducing identity sprawl.
• ITDR offers real-time detection and response to evolving threats by directly addressing identity blind spots. It allows for continuous monitoring of authentication requests, identifies anomalies in user behavior, enforces real-time multi-factor authentication (MFA) verification, and blocks unauthorized access before attackers can pivot to additional resources.

Source: Securing the Identity Attack Surface: A Deep Dive into the New Battlefield of Identity Security. Francis Odum. Software Analyst Cyber Research Report, February 2025.

Odum outlines that IASM cuts across traditional boundaries by combining a number of the most relevant use cases:

• Providing complete coverage of the identity lifecycle, identifying configuration states and hygiene across all identity types.
• Enforcing security policies across solutions to align security policies across all existing products.
• Identifying threats early while offering holistic risk assessments.
• Detecting exposed credentials, risky access patterns, and potential identity-based attack vectors that malicious actors could exploit.
• Identifying dormant accounts, excessive privileges, and exposed credentials across cloud services, third-party applications, and development environments.
• Prioritizing and resolving identity-based risks based on identity data source context and telemetry.

Reducing the Identity Attack Surface with AuthMind

AuthMind is pleased to be featured in Odum’s latest SACR research for its uniquely powerful approach to arming companies with the needed identity observability to maximize identity security. 

“AuthMind approaches the challenge of ISPM and ITDR with an observability-centric approach rather than static rule enforcement,” the SACR report states. It continues, “Its identity access graph correlates network traffic with identity events, providing organizations with a real-time, contextual understanding of access – not just who is accessing what, but how they are doing it…This approach allows AuthMind to uncover identity blind spots (shadow assets, missing MFA, unauthorized local accounts), surface hygiene issues, and identity infrastructure gaps (compromised identities, brute-force attacks, etc.) and detect shadow and suspicious activities, security bypasses, privileged access control violations, MFA circumventions and more. The full context of identity infrastructure—what is happening, why, and how to manage it—is critical for efficiently identifying and rapidly remediating identity-related risks and threats.”

The SACR report also states, “AuthMind’s observability-first approach is compelling,” denoting AuthMind’s distinctive difference within the sector. Indeed, the AuthMind Identity Protection Platform is designed to provide continuous, comprehensive visibility into all identities and access paths across multi-cloud, hybrid, SaaS, and on-premises environments. It enables the detection of identity blind spots, posture issues, and threats. The platform addresses identity security challenges by offering contextual identity observability, ISPM, and ITDR.

The full report is available online at: Securing the Identity Attack Surface: A Deep Dive into the New Battlefield of Identity Security.

Request a personalized demo to learn how AuthMind can help you solve your identity protection challenges.