Silverfort Research Finds Two-Thirds of Businesses Sync On-prem Passwords to Cloud Environments, Opening their Cloud to Cyberattack

TEL AVIV, Israel & BOSTON, March 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Silverfort, the Unified Identity Protection Company, unveiled its Identity Underground report, highlighting the frequency of identity security gaps that lead to successful attacks on organizations across every industry and region. Fueled by Silverfort's proprietary data, the report is the first of its kind, focusing on identity as an attack vector and offering insights into the Identity Threat Exposures (ITEs) that pave the way for cyberattacks. The data, analysis, and insights help identity and security teams benchmark their security programs, empowering them to make informed decisions on where to invest in identity security. 

The standout – and alarming – finding is that two out of every three businesses (67%) routinely synchronize most of their users' passwords from their on-premises directories to their cloud counterparts. This practice inadvertently migrates on-prem identity weaknesses to the cloud, which poses substantial security risks by creating a gateway for attackers to hack these environments from on-prem settings. The Alphv BlackCat ransomware group is known to use Active Directory as a stepping stone to compromise cloud identity providers.

Over the past decade, there has been a rush to migrate to the cloud – and for a good reason. Simultaneously, however, security gaps stemming from legacy infrastructure, misconfigurations, and insecure built-in features create pathways for attackers to access the cloud, significantly weakening a company's resilience to identity threats.

"Identity is the elephant in the room. We know that identity plays a key role in nearly every cyberattack. Lockbit, BlackCat, TA577, Fancy Bear – they all use identity gaps to break in, move laterally, and gain more permissions," said Hed Kovetz, CEO and Co-founder of Silverfort. "But we need to know how common each identity security gap is so we can start methodically fixing them. Finally, we have concrete evidence outlining the frequency of identity gaps, which we can now classify as Password Exposers, Lateral Movers, or Privilege Escalators, and they're all vehicles for threat actors to complete their attacks. We hope that by shining a light on the prevalence of these issues, identity and security teams will have the hard numbers they need to prioritize adequate security investments and eliminate these blind spots."

Key findings include:

Silverfort's research team has meticulously categorized Identity Threat Exposures (ITE) into four distinct classes. Their goal is to arm the cybersecurity industry with a framework to classify and understand the diverse spectrum of identity issues and misconfigurations that enable credential theft, privilege escalation, and lateral movement by malicious actors.

The four ITE categories

Join Silverfort's identity threat experts on April 16^th in partnership with Hacker News for a deep dive into the report findings. Visit Identity Underground to access the complete report.

About Silverfort

Silverfort, the Unified Identity Protection company, pioneered the first and only platform that enables modern identity security everywhere. We connect the silos of enterprise identity infrastructure to unify identity security across all on-prem and the cloud environments. Our unique architecture and vendor agnostic approach, takes away the complexity of securing every identity, and extends protection to resources that cannot be protected by any other solution, such as legacy systems, command-line interfaces, service accounts (non-human identities), IT/OT infrastructure, amongst others. Silverfort is a top-tier Microsoft partner and was selected as Microsoft's Zero Trust Champion of the Year. Hundreds of the world's leading enterprises trust Silverfort to be their identity security provider, including multiple Fortune 50 companies. Learn more by visiting www.silverfort.com or on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:
Jill Creelman
[email protected]

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