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24/06/2026 6:49 pm
TL;DR: Identity-related attacks increasingly exploit stolen credentials, session hijacking, phishing, and credential stuffing to gain unauthorised access, while Unosecur argues that visibility, activity-based permissioning, and temporary access are the practical controls. The governing issue is not just authentication strength, but whether identity permissions can be reduced fast enough to limit abuse windows.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Unosecur: Identity related security controls and how Unosecur helps prevent identity-related attacks
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce the impact of credential stuffing?
A: Security teams should combine MFA, credential leak monitoring, and login anomaly detection.
Q: Why do session hijacking attacks bypass normal password controls?
A: Session hijacking bypasses password controls because the attacker reuses a valid session rather than authenticating again.
Q: What breaks when organisations rely on standing access for high-risk roles?
A: Standing access gives an attacker immediate reach to privileged actions after compromise.
Practitioner guidance
- Enforce MFA across all internet-facing identity entry points Require multi-factor authentication for employee, admin, and partner access so a reused password alone cannot complete login.
- Reduce standing privilege with task-scoped access Use JIT and JEP patterns for elevated roles so attackers cannot immediately reuse broad standing access after compromise.
- Monitor sessions as first-class identity assets Track active sessions, anomalous geography, impossible travel, and sudden privilege changes, then revoke sessions when behaviour diverges from baseline.
What's in the full article
Unosecur's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A product walkthrough of the centralized identity dashboard and the specific visibility fields it surfaces for active, inactive, and administrative identities
- The IAM Analyzer’s action and service classification model, including how actions are separated into granted, executed, excessive, and high risk
- The no-code policy generation flow used to define Just Enough Privilege and Just-in-Time access for cloud roles
- The article’s examples of how temporary S3 access is expressed in policy form for a time-bounded task
👉 Read Unosecur's blog on identity-related attack controls and access governance →
Identity-related attacks: are your access controls keeping up?
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25/06/2026 3:46 am
Identity-related attacks are really governance failures, not just authentication failures. The article groups phishing, session hijacking, password cracking, and credential stuffing under one umbrella because each attack exploits a gap between identity proof and ongoing access control. Strong authentication reduces one path, but permission scope, session lifetime, and review cadence determine whether the compromise becomes a breach. Practitioners should treat identity attack prevention as a governance problem that spans login, privilege, and monitoring.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which means most environments cannot reliably see which non-human identities are exposed or over-privileged.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do identity controls fit into broader compliance and audit programmes?
A: Identity controls support compliance when they create evidence of who accessed what, when, and under which approval. Audit teams need revocation records, session logs, and access review outcomes, not only authentication policy statements, to prove that access is governed rather than assumed.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity-related attack controls still hinge on access governance
