Protect the new attack surface. Break the attack chain.

PROTECT THE NEW ATTACK SURFACE.
BREAK THE ATTACK CHAIN.

We continue to use the term 'people-centric’ to describe the modern threat landscape and the style of defence required to protect against it. Identity is now being used by threat actors to further their cybercriminal gains. Quite literally following a pattern, or an ‘attack chain’.

The threat actors start by targeting your people through attacks like credential phishing emails and by landing malware. Once they compromise an account, an identity, they’ve won. They’re now inside your environment using that identity to move laterally through your organization to achieve their goals of ransomware or data exfiltration. Proofpoint Identity Threat Defense provides protection at this imperative, middle section of the attack chain.

How are cybercriminals attacking identity?

Along with high-value targets such as administrators or finance contacts, modern threat actors also target great swathes of unmanaged and misconfigured identities that are often not afforded the same protections. This can include service accounts, local and shadow admins, cached credentials and many others that often slip through the net of privilege and password security tools.

Findings from Analyzing Identity Risks (AIR) Research Report.

40% OF SHADOW ADMIN CAN BE EXPOLITED IN ONE STEP

EVERY ORGANIZATION HAS EXPLOITABLE IDENTITY RISKS AT THE RATE OF 1 IN 6 ENDPOINTS

87% OF LOCAL ADMINS ARE NOT ENROLLED IN A PRIVILEGED ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

PRIVILEGED ACCOUNT PASSWORDS ARE LEFT EXPOSED ON 13% OF ENDPOINTS

By targeting identities like these, cybercriminals can bypass standard perimeter defences with minimal effort or technical knowhow. And, as 87% of shadow admins are not enrolled in a PAM solution and 40% of shadow admins can be exploited in a single step, attacks of this nature are often successful. Very successful, in fact 84% of organizations fell victim to an identity-related breach in the past year.

ONCE AN IDENTITY VULNERABILITY IS EXPLOITED, THREAT ACTORS CAN MOVE LATERALLY THROUGH SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS, AMASSING INTELLIGENCE, DISTRIBUTING MALICIOUS PAYLOADS AND EXFILTRATING DATA.

The longer any malicious actor lays undetected, the greater their opportunity to traverse through identities – from privilege escalation to abuse of Active Directory and cloud environments. And the more potentially devastating the consequences.

IT’S CURRENTLY FAR TOO EASY FOR AN ATTACKER TO TURN ONE COMPROMISED IDENTITY INTO AN ORGANIZATION-WIDE RANSOMWARE INCIDENT OR DATA BREACH. THE ACQUISITION OF ILLUSIVE REINFORCES PROOFPOINT’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION AND GROWTH, BRINGING MARKET-DEFINING TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THREAT ACTORS’ JOBS AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE.”

Ryan Kalember, EVP, Cybersecurity Strategy, Proofpoint

Defending against such identity-focused attacks requires two distinct capabilities
Firstly, organizations must have the means to discover and fix identity
vulnerabilities before they are exploited. And, as no single tool is 100% impenetrable, additional technology is required to detect and respond to identity threats and stop privilege escalation and lateral network movement.Thanks to Proofpoint Spotlight™ and Proofpoint Shadow™ technologies, Identity Threat Defense can do both. Spotlight delivers unparalleled visibility into vulnerable identities by scanning directory structures, PAM solutions, endpoints, servers and services, revealing the gaps between the intention of your identity security policies and the reality of your environment.Shadow is undefeated in over 150 red team exercises. It allows organizations to deterministically accelerate threat detection by identifying threats based on attacker interaction with deceptions, not probabilistic controls based on signatures or behaviours.So, with the acquisition of Illusive, Proofpoint has enhanced its market leading threat and information protection platforms by adding proactive identity risk discovery and remediation as well as a robust post-breach defence capability. The result is a unified solution that extends protection across the entire attack chain for critical threats like ransomware and data breaches, gives organizations unprecedented insights into their privileged access attack surface and helps security teams better protect those at most risk of attack.

Read more about breaking the attack chain with Identity Threat Defense.

Find out more in our

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Proofpoint Spotlight^TM

Proofpoint Shadow^TM

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Proofpoint Identity Threat Defense discovers privileged identity
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compromise - discover and stop attackers before they move
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