Navigating Identity Threats: A Comprehensive Guide to ITDR

What is ITDR?

Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is a cybersecurity discipline that aims to safeguard identity-based systems and user identities from numerous digital threats.

ITDR encompasses threat intelligence, security tools, behavioral analysis, and other strategies focused on ensuring that identity infrastructure is secure. This also means that potential breaches can be mitigated swiftly and effectively.

Why ITDR is critical for effective cybersecurity

In order to implement an effective cybersecurity posture that protects your business, you’ll need to incorporate ITDR.

As cybercriminals constantly hone their approaches, identity-focused attacks are emerging as a particularly appealing medium for bad actors.

For businesses operating in today’s digital landscape, a cybersecurity strategy that doesn't include ITDR simply is not enough to protect your organization.

Identity threats: an overview

As opposed to a traditional cyber attack, in which a bad actor may use brute force or malware to gain access to your company’s sensitive data and internal systems, identity threats involve the use of impersonations or improperly obtained credentials.

This style of attack is becoming increasingly popular, so it’s critical that your business has a robust approach for identity threat detection and response.

ITDR Security: Key Concepts

There are a plethora of identity-centered threats facing companies today. Here are the ones you’re most likely to encounter:

Phishing

• Phishing attacks see cybercriminals use legitimate-looking, convincing messages that trick users into revealing their login credentials.
• These communications could appear to have originated from one of your service or solutions providers, or even from within your company itself.
• Bad actors often use persuasive branding, logos, and other imagery to fool users into believing that what they’re seeing is the real thing.

Social Engineering

• In these sophisticated identity-focused attacks, cybercriminals impersonate a real individual, oftentimes someone that the victim actually knows.
• This could be a senior-level executive at your organization, a trusted colleague, or even a client.
• Once the target is convinced they are communicating with a legitimate person, they may turn over sensitive data, credentials, or other information to the cybercriminal.

Identity Theft

• Aimed at obtaining users’ personal information and login credentials, these attacks can manifest in many different ways.
• Oftentimes, bad actors leverage login info, such as usernames and passwords, that were leaked in previous data breaches.
• Using these credentials, cybercriminals infiltrate organizations while pretending to be a specific employee and using their access to obtain sensitive data for nefarious reasons.

ITDR Detection: What You Should Know

There are several popular methods for detecting identity threats. Considering the scale and frequency of these threats, using AI-based technology solutions is the most effective way to mitigate the risk of identity-focused attacks on your organization.

Most of these tools leverage anomaly detection and behavioral analysis. Anomaly detection involves identifying and discovering unusual patterns that may suggest suspicious activity, such as a high number of logins within a short period of time. 

In a similar vein, behavioral analysis also takes into account activity levels and whether or not they are within the normal range for your users. Things like failed logins, users logging in at strange hours for their time zones, or repeatedly attempting to access company assets that are not relevant for their role, could potentially raise red flags.

Identity Threat Detection and Response Strategies

There are a number of critical steps you should take to mitigate identity threats before they negatively impact your business. Having incident response plans and procedures in place mean that you can act quickly when it matters most.

You should determine what your organization considers to be normal user behavior, and use that baseline to establish emergency protocols for scenarios that deviate from that norm. 

This could look like automatically locking out a user after 2 failed login attempts, requiring two-factor authentication, or sending a verification email should a user login from an unusual device or location.

The Fundamentals of Effective ITDR Security

Let’s break down the basic components of a strong ITDR strategy to protect your business.

Identity Management

• Identity management plays a critical role within ITDR, because it helps prevent breaches before they occur and means that you stay on top of unusual activity.
• Authentication and authorization mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and verification emails are important tools to help ensure that logins are legitimate, as part of a zero-trust approach that ensures credentials aren’t enough to gain access.
• This could look like sending an SMS or other notification to a user’s physical device and requiring them to enter a confirmation code. This way, even if their credentials were stolen, a bad actor can’t log in.

Monitoring Systems

• You should leverage tools and platforms for monitoring identity-related activity and user behavior. These solutions can continuously review login attempts and access controls, informing you when something is out of the ordinary.
• Log analysis and correlation techniques help you quickly recognize strange user behavior, which may be indicative of a bad actor trying to gain access to your organization’s systems and data.
• Consider setting notifications for unusual events, so you can act fast if something is amiss.

 Incident Response Tools

• These technologies help you respond to identity threats in real-time, meaning that you can stop a potential breach while it’s in progress.
• Look for tools that offer automation and orchestration capabilities, so that a series of measures are automatically rolled out should a suspicious event occur (e.g. a login attempt from a foreign country automatically triggers an alert and a verification SMS).
• You can usually implement custom settings within these tools, such as tiered prioritization of emerging threats and automated protocols for specific scenarios.

Best Practices for ITDR Security

These best practices can help you ensure an effective ITDR strategy to safeguard your organization.

Proactive Measures

Education and training for employees can be extremely effective in protecting your company from identity-focused attacks. Implementing security awareness programs that teach your teams about classic warning signs of phishing and other attacks are critical for raising awareness. 

Continuous Improvement

Conducting regular security assessments and audits is crucial. Integration with threat intelligence feeds can help you stay on top of the latest ITDR risks and ensure you’re aware of emerging threats. Being complacent could mean setting your organization up for disaster. 

Collaboration and Communication

Coordination among IT, security, and business teams is key to ensuring the overall cybersecurity of your business, including ITDR. Incident reporting and communication protocols should be laid out clearly, and you should work to take down any information silos: all teams should be forthcoming and honest about any concerns.

ITDR Challenges and Considerations

Scalability may be a challenge for ITDR solutions. For large organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees, this is particularly complex. Adopting a zero-trust approach alongside tools that can grow with your business is paramount. Consider creating a dedicated SOC team that specifically deals with alerts regarding identity threats.

Compliance and Privacy

There are a number of legal requirements related to identity protection, especially in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. You’ll need to ensure that your ITDR tools are in compliance with data protection laws. 

Privacy concerns are also a factor. Balancing security needs with privacy considerations may complicate your use of specific monitoring solutions. These tools will also need to safeguard personal information during incident responses.

ITDR Future Trends 

AI and Machine Learning are continuing to improve identity threat detection and response solutions. As new threats begin to crop up, these solutions should be able to recognize additional ITDR risks as they occur.

The increasing popularity of blockchain may yet make an impact on ITDR. With blockchain for identity management emerging as an appealing option, this may become a more mainstream choice within an overall identity protection strategy.

Here’s What Your ITDR Solution Should Provide

There are a number of solutions aimed at detecting and resolving ITDR risks, both stand-alone and those within overall SaaS tools. However, these solutions aren’t all created equal and may not provide what you need for effective ITDR security. 

Your ITDR solution should include the following:

Smart identity security posture discovery 

Ever hear of alert fatigue? This term is used to describe solutions without the ability to distinguish between normal business activity and behavior that should raise a red flag.

Oftentimes, these tools end up bombarding security teams with so many notifications about potential threats that teams simply stop paying attention.

Even worse, this means that actual pressing security issues end up getting lost in the mix, and may never be mitigated.

Your ITDR solution should use aggregated data visibility for true risk prioritization. That means each identity within your business should be risk-assessed, based on comprehensive data collection including data access patterns, user permissions and relevant business context from HRIS.

Whether it’s in reference to a long-time employee or third-party contractor, your ITDR solution should be able to determine high-risk scenarios and users and flag them, notifying you about the threats that really matter.

Advanced user behavior anomaly detection 

Your ITDR solution needs to monitor activity anomalies based on user and department benchmarks. That means it should be able to establish a baseline of normal behavior, so that sudden changes from that standard become a cause for concern and action.

A strong ITDR solution must alert security teams regarding deviations from normal identity activity patterns. For example, this could look like when a finance employee shares an unusual number of files with an external account.  

The same goes for other unusual behaviors that could be a sign of something nefarious. Without an understanding of what’s normal and what’s a potential risk, your solution can’t detect or notify you in the event of suspicious activity.

Robust user-level response 

With the average businesses granting hundreds or even thousands of access permissions to individual users, managing all your exposures across many user identities and resources is more challenging than ever before. 

Whether you want to remove access for an employee who’s recently departed from your company or a third-party collaborator, manual management of access controls is timestaking and oftentimes simply not effective in today’s reality.

You need a system that both enables you to perform bulk and automated removals, along with the option to remove exposure per user and manage data access across identities.

Your ITDR solution should enable on-demand permission changes per user across SaaS applications and assets, as well as internal and third-party user suspension or deactivation.