All news with #identity posture tag

An Open Letter to Cybersecurity Vendors and Investors

🔊 The cybersecurity market is awash in noise: vendors and investors chase flashy pitches while the long-standing vulnerabilities that cause real breaches remain neglected. The author argues CISOs don’t buy technology so much as they buy reduced risk and confidence, so purchases must fit roadmaps, integrate cleanly, and be sustainable. He prioritizes visibility, identity, automation that empowers people, and tools that reinforce fundamentals like patching and segmentation. Hype, overlapping products, and complexity are rejected in favor of practical reliability.

Moving Beyond Frameworks: Real-Time Risk Assessments

🔍 Organizations are shifting from annual, checklist-driven compliance to targeted, frequent risk assessments that address emerging threats in real time. The article contrasts gap analyses — which measure adherence to frameworks like NIST or ISO — with tailored risk reviews focused on specific threat paths (for example, access control, ransomware, AI or cloud misconfigurations). It recommends small, repeatable questionnaires, a simple scoring model and executive-ready outputs to prioritize remediation and integrate risk into governance.

Microsoft Secure Future Initiative — November 2025 Report

🔐 Microsoft’s November 2025 progress report on the Secure Future Initiative outlines governance expansion, engineering milestones, and product hardening across Azure, Microsoft 365, Windows, Surface, and Microsoft Security. The update highlights measurable gains — a nine-point rise in security sentiment, 95% employee completion of AI-attack training, 99.6% phishing-resistant MFA enforcement, and 99.5% live-secrets detection and remediation. It also introduces AI-first security capabilities, new detections, and 10 actionable SFI patterns to help customers improve posture.

Preparing for the Digital Battlefield of Identity Risk

🔒 BeyondTrust's 2026 predictions argue that the next major breaches will stem from unmanaged identity debt rather than simple phishing. The report highlights three identity-driven threats: agentic AI acting as privileged deputies vulnerable to prompt manipulation, automated "account poisoning" in financial systems, and long-dormant "ghost" identities surfacing in legacy IAM. The authors recommend an identity-first posture with strict least-privilege, context-aware controls, real-time auditing, and stronger identity governance.

Identity Crisis at the Perimeter: AI-Driven Impersonation

🛡️ Organizations face an identity crisis as generative AI and vast troves of breached personal data enable realistic digital doppelgangers. Attackers now automate hyper-personalized phishing, smishing and vishing, clone voices, and run coordinated multi-channel campaigns that reference real colleagues and recent projects. The article urges a shift to “never trust, always verify,” with radical visibility, rapid detection and phishing-resistant authentication such as FIDO2. It also warns of emerging agentic AI and recommends strict least-privilege controls plus continuous red-teaming.

Scattered Spider Resurfaces, Targets Financial Sector Again

🔍 Cyber threat group Scattered Spider has been linked to a new campaign targeting financial services, according to ReliaQuest. The attackers gained access by socially engineering an executive and abusing Azure AD self-service password reset, then moved laterally via Citrix and VPN to compromise VMware ESXi. They escalated privileges by resetting a Veeam service account, assigning Azure Global Administrator rights, and attempted data extraction from Snowflake and AWS. The activity contradicts the group's retirement claims and suggests regrouping or rebranding.

Onboarding Attacks: When Fake Hires Become Insider Threats

🔐 Attackers are increasingly bypassing email defenses by infiltrating organizations through the hiring process, as in the 'Jordan' example where a bogus hire gained broad access on day one. Remote recruiting, AI-generated profiles and deepfakes have turned identity into the new perimeter, undermining traditional vetting. Adopting zero standing privileges—with JIT/JEP, strict baselines and comprehensive auditing—and tools such as BeyondTrust Entitle can remove persistent access and automate time‑bound, auditable privilege grants.

Weak Passwords Fuel Rise in Compromised Accounts in 2025

🔐 The Picus Blue Report 2025 finds that password cracking succeeded in 46% of tested environments, while Valid Accounts (T1078) exploitation achieved a 98% success rate. Many organizations still rely on weak passwords, outdated hashing, and lax internal controls, leaving credential stores exposed. The report urges adoption of widespread MFA, stronger password policies, routine credential-validation simulations, and improved behavioral detection to reduce undetected lateral movement and data theft.

Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security Unifies Protection

🔒 CrowdStrike announced Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security, a unified solution to protect human, non-human, and AI agent identities across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. It consolidates initial access prevention, modern secure privileged access, identity threat detection and response (ITDR), SaaS identity security, and agentic identity protection into a single sensor and management console. Delivered via the AI-native Falcon platform, the offering provides real-time visibility, dynamic access enforcement, and autonomous response to reduce identity-driven breaches and simplify hybrid identity security.

CrowdStrike Named Leader in GigaOm SSPM Radar 2025

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named the only Leader and Outperformer in the 2025 GigaOm Radar for SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM). The recognition highlights the CrowdStrike Falcon platform's unified, AI-native approach—combining Falcon Shield, identity protection and cloud security—to detect and remediate misconfigurations, identity threats, and unauthorized SaaS access. Falcon Shield's extensive integrations, automated policy responses via Falcon Fusion SOAR, and GenAI-focused controls underpin its market-leading posture and support continuous visibility across human and non-human identities.

Sparkasse Partners with Google for EU Age Assurance

🔐 Google and Germany’s Sparkasse announced a wallet-based EU age assurance service that lets customers prove age online without sharing personal data. Using the Credential Manager API, Google Wallet and zero-knowledge cryptography, Sparkasse will issue trusted credentials across its network of 343 regional savings banks serving 50 million customers. Integration with Android and Chrome enables one-click age checks for apps and sites and will roll out in the coming months.