Identity Detection & Response (IDR) systems play an essential role in preventing modern threat actors from exploiting entitlements and vulnerable credentials to move around networks unnoticed.
With the rise of identity-based threats, today’s enterprises need to be able to detect when threat actors attempt to misuse, exploit, or steal organizational identities. This is especially true as businesses rush to adopt the public cloud, and the number of human and non-human identities continues to grow at an exponential rate. Given attackers’ propensity for using credentials and Active Directory (AD), detecting identity-based behavior has become crucial.
Identity Detection and Response (IDR) fills a key role in the identity security environment. IDR sets itself apart from other identity protection solutions by focusing on privileges, credentials, cloud entitlements, and the systems that handle them. It is a significant step forward because it introduces a new category of security solutions.
Addressing today’s threats
The threat to identities is real, and given the consequences of their misuse, every CISO should prioritize it. Attackers repeatedly attempt to access genuine credentials and use them to move unnoticed via networks.
The rise of attack strategies like ransomware 2.0 has also been aided by credential misuse. It’s evident that better identity security is needed, particularly the ability to identify suspicious behavior using authorized account credentials.
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The Need for IDR
IDR’s primary capabilities include detecting active directory attacks, privilege misuse, credential theft, and dangerous entitlements that provide attack vectors. Entitlements, Identities, and the systems that handle them are all explicitly protected by IDR solutions.
This contrasts sharply with existing identity protection solutions such as Privileged Access Management (PAM), Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). These are primarily concerned with authentication and authorization, along with ensuring that the right people have access to the resources they require.
IDR, on the other hand, intervenes to offer visibility into entitlement exposures, credential abuse, and privilege escalation actions across the board, from multi-cloud environments to the endpoint and AD.
Some businesses assume that having EDR in place will safeguard them. EDR is a reliable control for detecting endpoint threats and collecting data for assessment. IDR solutions work differently, looking for threats that target identities. Once an IDR system detects an attack, it adds a layer of defense by sending bogus data to a decoy.
It can also isolate the compromised system that is running the query. In addition to collecting forensic data and obtaining telemetry on the processes employed during the attack, IDR systems aid in incident response.
Some IDR systems can also handle the identity attack surface by helping a company see the exposures that leave identities vulnerable to attack. These may include stolen endpoint credentials, permissive entitlements in cloud environments that could provide attackers access to critical data and workloads, and AD misconfigurations, allowing attackers to extract data and conduct attacks. Minimizing these exposures protects organizational identities by limiting what threat actors can exploit.
Attacks are increasingly migrating from on-premises to the cloud. IDR solutions extend smoothly to the cloud, providing detailed entitlement visibility for applications, users, server less operations, containers, and other assets.
Permission sprawl has become a serious problem with so many human and non-human identities to handle. The expanding adoption of remote working, DevOps processes, and cloud migration has increased the requirement to minimize attackers’ ability to get excessive rights or privileges that allow them to move between domains.
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