Identity-related attacks: are your access controls keeping up?

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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