Today’s cyber criminals have found something far easier than hacking through your defences—they’re stealing the keys and opening the gates.
The security playing field has changed. Your network perimeter isn't what it used to be—it's dissolved, replaced by something far more fluid and harder to secure. Today, identity has become the new battleground.
In security terms, an identity is anything that can authenticate to your systems—employee accounts, admin credentials, service accounts, API keys, and even machine identities that your applications use to talk to each other. Each one is a potential key to your kingdom.
Let’s take a look at why this matters, and how to protect your business.
An identity-based attack begins not with exploiting a technical vulnerability, but with compromising the digital identity of someone or something with legitimate access to your systems. These are the shadows lurking within your organisation's access framework—the credentials, accounts, and permissions that define who can reach what, when, and how.
The statistics tell an interesting story; one survey found that 93% of organisations have experienced two or more breaches due to identity-related cyberattacks, with 99% of affected organisations suffering negative business impacts. This isn't a theoretical threat; it's the reality for nearly every business.
Identity has become the new security perimeter in our interconnected world. When your workforce accesses company resources from anywhere, traditional network boundaries dissolve, leaving identities as the primary control point between your data and those who seek it.
Let's walk through a typical scenario:
Sarah, a finance director at a mid-sized manufacturing firm, receives an email that appears to be from Microsoft, warning that her account access will expire unless she verifies her credentials. The email looks legit—it has the right logo, formatting, and a professional tone. Concerned about losing access during month-end closing, she clicks the link and enters her username and password on the convincing-looking login page.
What Sarah doesn't realise is that she's just handed her credentials to an attacker.
Within hours, the attacker logs into her Microsoft 365 account from an unrecognised location. The company's security tools don't flag this because it looks like a legitimate login—correct username, correct password. The attacker begins by setting up email forwarding rules to receive copies of Sarah's financial communications and to hide any security alerts that might be sent to her.
Over the next three weeks, the attacker:
When the fraud is finally discovered during reconciliation, the company faces a multi-layered nightmare:
What looked like a single compromised account ended up costing hundreds of thousands in direct losses, remediation costs, and lost productivity—all because one identity was compromised.
This attack wasn't Sarah's fault—it exploited normal human behaviour and trust. Several key safeguards could have stopped this attack at multiple stages, though:
would have prevented the attacker from accessing Sarah's account, even with her password
could have flagged the login from an unusual location and device
could have restricted what actions can be performed from unrecognised devices
would have identified unusual patterns of access across multiple systems
for financial systems would have required additional verification before payment approval
would have helped Sarah recognise the phishing attempt, giving her the confidence to verify suspicious communications through official channels
None of these controls blame or burden Sarah—they simply add invisible guardrails that protect identities and catch attackers when credentials are compromised.
Conventional security has long focused on creating stronger walls—better firewalls, more secure endpoints, intrusion detection systems. But these tools struggle to detect what appears legitimate. If an attacker uses valid credentials, how does your security system recognise the threat?
This is why identity-based breaches are particularly dangerous. The average time to detect an identity-based breach is 168 days—nearly six months during which attackers can conduct reconnaissance, compromise accounts, and extract data. That's half a year of someone exploring your network and accessing your sensitive information. They’re planting seeds in your garden without you noticing.
Traditional approaches fail here because they're designed to spot abnormal entry points, not abnormal behaviour from trusted sources. When the attack looks like business as usual, conventional security is effectively blind.
It’s all too tempting to throw your budget toward the latest AI-powered cybersecurity tools. These cutting-edge solutions promise to revolutionise your security posture with predictive analytics, automated threat hunting, and real-time attack prevention. Great—but they won’t solve all your problems.
Your organisation is probably using a lot of cloud services right now. That represents a lot of boosted productivity. But it also means a lot of potential attack vectors.
Why should digital trespassers bother breaking a window when they can walk in through the front door instead?
If you're currently experiencing a breach, reach out to our team
0800 644 2424