All news with #identity security tag

🔐 Microsoft Threat Intelligence details how Storm-2949 converted targeted identity compromise into a broad cloud breach, exfiltrating data from Microsoft 365 and production workloads in Azure. The actor abused SSPR-based social engineering to bypass MFA, performed directory discovery via Graph API, and leveraged management-plane operations to retrieve Key Vault secrets and download large volumes of data. Organizations should adopt behavior-based detections such as Microsoft Defender and tighten RBAC and administrative controls to detect and mitigate similar identity-driven cloud attacks.

🌐 AWS outlines how to present a single, brand-aligned vanity entry point (for example, aws.mycompany.com) in front of IAM Identity Center multi-Region access portals. The approach uses Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing, Application Load Balancer 302 redirects, and optional Amazon ARC Region switches for automated failover while TLS is managed through AWS Certificate Manager. Traffic is directed to the nearest healthy regional portal and the vanity domain does not persist in the browser address bar.

🔒 Semperis finds that 93% of global organizations use or plan to use AI agents for security tasks such as password resets and VPN access, while 92% report AI on endpoints with SSH and encryption key access. The survey of 1,100 organizations warns of over‑permissioned and abandoned 'zombie' non‑human identities that increase hijack risk. Semperis recommends treating agents as NHIs, enforcing least‑privilege, and improving observability and recovery readiness.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks has unveiled Idira, an identity security platform designed to protect human users, machine identities, and autonomous AI agents by applying dynamic privilege controls across all identity types. The platform leverages Palo Alto’s integration of CyberArk and continuously discovers and enriches identities across SaaS, cloud, and developer environments. Idira elevates privileges only when required and revokes them immediately, aiming to close blind spots left by legacy IAM and PAM systems. Analysts say it targets gaps in offerings such as Auth0 and SailPoint but does not eliminate the need for layered security.

🔐 Idira is Palo Alto Networks' next-generation identity security platform, unveiled at IMPACT following the company's integration with CyberArk. It discovers every human, machine and AI agent, inventories entitlements across network, cloud, endpoints and browsers, and evaluates whether access is necessary. Idira replaces standing accounts with dynamic, just-in-time privileges and automates continuous governance, shrinking the fragmentation that delays incident response. The platform embeds AI to surface risky entitlements and drive rapid remediation, while integrating with Strata, Cortex and Prisma to enforce controls where users and agents work.

🔐 This Unit 42 report examines how misconfigured Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) components create high-impact attack surfaces that enable privilege escalation, identity impersonation, and persistent access. It details exploitation techniques—especially certificate template misconfigurations and shadow credential abuse—tools observed in the wild, and a five-phase adversary lifecycle. The report emphasizes behavioral detection, telemetry correlation, and mitigation guidance to help defenders close monitoring gaps.

🔐 Amazon announced new administration features for SageMaker Unified Studio that give administrators finer control over identity configuration and user management across both IAM and IAM Identity Center domain types. Administrators can now configure AWS IAM Identity Center for SSO onboarding, add IAM roles, users, and groups as project members, and manage domain users from a consolidated admin portal. For Identity Center domains, federated access through IAM roles now produces unique user sessions so collaborators sharing a role do not overwrite each other and actions remain auditable. These updates enable teams to use corporate IAM or IAM Identity Center identities consistently across domains and simplify collaboration and auditing in the Studio environment.

🔒 Having an incident response retainer or a pre-approved external firm is not the same as being operationally ready. Readiness requires pre-provisioned accounts, validated permissions, and practiced workflows so responders can gain immediate visibility into identity, cloud, EDR, and logs. The guide prioritizes identity-first visibility, out-of-band communications, a designated incident manager, and pre-tested activation procedures to eliminate delays that allow attackers to deepen compromise.

🛡️ Analysts and Orchid Security warn that enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than governance can keep up, creating an invisible layer of "identity dark matter" that conventional IAM misses. Orchid Security inspects applications at the binary and configuration layer to discover agents, audit compliance, and locate static credentials. Its Ask Orchid assistant answers natural-language questions about active agents, NIST compliance, and credential risks, then recommends prioritized remediation. This in-application observability aims to close the structural gap in identity visibility and enforce purpose-bound, least-privilege controls.

🛡️ AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has raised maximum quotas for six resource types to help customers scale. Updated limits include customer managed policies, instance profiles, managed policies per role, role trust policy length, roles per account, and OpenID Connect providers. These changes give teams more flexibility to design IAM controls and support growing workloads. To request increases, use Service Quotas or AWS Support per region.

🛡️ Hiring fraud has produced thousands of fake IT workers who gain trusted access and create serious insider risks. Companies such as Amazon report coordinated attempts tied to state actors, while researchers like SentinelOne and vendors observe AI-enabled deepfakes, synthetic identities and stolen US credentials used to pass recruitment checks. Organizations must treat remote hiring as an access-control problem: strengthen identity screening, enforce staged trust, and deploy continuous post-hire telemetry and behavioral detection.

🔐 Hazel Burton summarizes Cisco Talos' Year in Review and outlines five critical priorities for defenders facing an increasingly automated threat landscape. While AI and accessible exploit code have lowered the barrier for attackers, adversaries still follow predictable patterns and reuse infrastructure, producing detectable anomalies. Defenders should treat identity infrastructure as a top-tier asset, secure MFA workflows with strict verification, prioritize patching by internet exposure, hunt long-tail legacy risks, and apply enhanced monitoring to management-plane systems to focus detection on anomalous post-login behavior and reduce alert fatigue.

🔐 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports configuring a JSON Web Key Set (JWKS) URL for JWT authentication. With a JWKS URL configured, OpenSearch domains automatically fetch and validate public keys from an identity provider’s JWKS endpoint, removing the need to manually manage static keys when providers rotate signing keys. The feature includes built-in security validation checks and clearer error messaging, requires OpenSearch version 3.3 or later, and can be configured via the console, AWS CLI, or the CreateDomain and UpdateDomainConfig APIs.

🛡️ Identity management is changing as AI agents introduce a new class of non‑human identities that can act, decide, and access resources at machine speed. Experts including Dustin Wilcox and Michael Adams recommend an identity-first security posture built on clean directories, enforced least privilege, and clear offboarding. They warn that legacy models and inventory processes won’t track proliferating tokens and agents, so organizations should catalog non‑human identities, assign ownership, and treat MFA as a baseline while moving toward phishing‑resistant methods and continuous verification.

🔒 The contributor reframes AI agents as delegated identities rather than independent actors, arguing enterprises cannot safely govern agents without first governing the identities that delegate authority to them. It calls out pervasive "identity dark matter"—unmanaged human and machine credentials that create hidden permissions and execution paths which agents can amplify. The piece recommends sequencing remediation: first illuminate and reduce identity dark matter across humans, bots, and service accounts, then feed continuous telemetry into a real‑time delegation authority engine. Orchid's continuous observability model is presented as that live feed, enabling dynamic decisions to allow, recommend, constrain, or block agent actions based on delegator posture, intent, application context, and scope.

🔐 The article highlights that Forrester estimates each password reset costs roughly $70 and that self-service password reset (SSPR) tools have not eliminated helpdesk involvement. Attackers target resets to bypass MFA, as illustrated by the April 2025 Marks & Spencer incident tied to the Scattered Spider group, which began with a social-engineered reset and escalated to NTDS.dit extraction and ransomware. It recommends identity verification tools such as Specops Secure Service Desk, strong single-use temporary credentials, monitoring of reset activity, and clearer helpdesk procedures to reduce risk.

🔐 The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) now recommends passkeys as the preferred sign-in method for consumers, advising passwords only when passkeys are unavailable. This follows a year of collaboration with the FIDO Alliance, observed improvements across the passkey ecosystem and successful NHS deployments. The NCSC also urges businesses to adopt passkeys as the default and to use single sign-on (SSO) where possible, with additional business guidance expected.

🌐 Amazon SageMaker now supports multi-region replication from IAM Identity Center (IdC), allowing administrators to deploy SageMaker Unified Studio domains in regions separate from their IdC instance. This capability preserves centralized single sign-on while enabling data residency and sovereignty controls. It is aimed at enterprise and regulated customers who need to process sensitive data in specific jurisdictions without fragmenting identity management.

🔐 Identity-centric systems have evolved from simple login mechanisms into the operational backbone of digital enterprises. By replacing the old network perimeter with a person- and device-centric model, modern identity frameworks enable fine-grained access control, real-time authorization and auditable accountability across cloud, mobile and distributed workforces. They also power customer personalization and fraud detection, helping teams move faster while reducing operational and security risk.

🔐 This sponsored article from Specops Software explains five practical ways Zero Trust reduces identity-related risk by centering access controls on verified identities and device posture. It emphasizes least privilege, continuous context-aware authentication tied to device health, and strict segmentation to limit lateral movement. The piece spotlights Specops Device Trust as an example of binding identity to compliant devices and recommends prioritizing phishing-resistant MFA and device checks when starting a Zero Trust rollout.