By the Numbers: The Enterprise Identity Threat Landscape

This week, two major players in the enterprise identity and access management released reports detailing the identity threat landscape. Digital identity management solution provider ForgeRock unveiled the U.S. Consumer Data Breach Report 2019, an essential resource for consumer-facing businesses.

Meanwhile, privileged access management provider BeyondTrust shared their Privileged Access Threat Report 2019; this details the dangers of insiders, vendors, and privileged users in the identity threat landscape.

What do these two reports teach us about the enterprise identity threat landscape? What do their findings mean for your identity and access management or privileged access management strategies?

We explore both reports below!

The BeyondTrust Privileged Access Threat Report 2019

You can read the BeyondTrust Privileged Access Threat Report 2019 as a primer on how attackers reach your databases and digital assets. Here are some of its key findings:

• 64% of surveyed security decision-makers say they suffered a breach over the past year due to misused or abused employee access.
• Simultaneously, breaches stemming from direct or indirect employee behaviors caused 35% of breaches in 2019. This represents a significant increase from last year.
• 60% of enterprises continue to struggle with employees writing down their passwords.
• Meanwhile, 58% still deal with employees sharing their credentials and passwords with colleagues.
• Another 58% believe they deal with breaches stemming from their third-party vendors.
• Over half of respondents perceive moderate identity risk from BYOD policies or the IoT.      

Above all, the BeyondTrust Privileged Access Threat Report 2019 also highlights how security hygiene practices influence the identity threat landscape. Indeed, plenty of enterprises battle against dangerous behaviors such as logging in over an unsecured WiFi channel, staying logged in, and sending files to personal email accounts.

ForgeRock U.S. Consumer Data Breach Report 2019

Conversely, you can read the ForgeRock U.S. Consumer Data Breach Report 2019 as a guide on what hackers target. Additionally, it serves as a necessary reminder as to the consequences of an identity data breach. Here are its key findings:

• In 2018, cybercriminals exposed 2.8 billion consumer data records.
• Altogether, breaches cost U.S. enterprises $654 billion.
• The U.S. financial sector lost $6.2 billion in Q1 of 2019. In Q1 2018, it only cost $8 million.
• 97% of all 2018 breaches targeted personally identifiable information (PII). Dates of Birth and Social Security numbers were the most commonly targeted data sets.
• 34% of all attacks stem from unauthorized access.
• Healthcare, Financial Services, and Government are the three most commonly targeted industries for cyber attacks.
• In fact, the healthcare industry suffered 48% of all breaches.
• Even though Q1 2019 saw fewer breaches than the year prior, the significance of the breaches increased; the number of records affected by cyber attacks rose 78,900%.

Keep in mind, the average data breach costs enterprises of any size close to $4 million.

What the Identity Threat Landscape Means For You

Obviously, your enterprise needs a next-generation identity and access management solution. That should go without saying, but enterprises continue to struggle with the realities of the identity threat landscape.

In short, manual controls over permissions or privileges should not serve as your identity management strategy. Not only can it lead to dangerous human errors, but it also provides you with no session monitoring or direct control over employee access. Moreover, such a system proves impossible to scale.

Additionally, legacy solutions can’t give your enterprise the multifactor authentication necessary to alleviate the dangers of passwords. As passwords prove increasingly unreliable, this capability proves equally essential.

The reports by BeyondTrust and ForgeRock show just perils and potential pitfalls of the identity threat landscape. The time has never been better to upgrade your identity and access management solution.

Fortunately, you can learn more about IAM and PAM in our 2019 Buyer’s Guide. We detail the key capabilities of the major vendors and provide our Bottom Line for each!

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