Mapping Mayhem: Security's Blind Spots In Identity Security
Security Boulevard, Tuesday, July 29th, 2025
For years, primarily driven by regulatory compliance mandates, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, identity and access management has been treated as a regulatory compliance exercise, rather than the security exercise it should be - and simply checking off compliance requirements leaves many organizations with a dangerous and false sense of security. This is the central warning from the State of Attack Path Management report from SpecterOps, released today.
Organizations today consist of a complex web of identities, and their associated privileges can efficiently serve as a pathway for attackers, just as they do for legitimate users. Today's report lays out how threat actors exploit the hidden relationships between accounts, services, and privilege assignments to achieve compromise-even in organizations that believe themselves to be well-defended.
Jared Atkinson, chief technology officer at SpecterOps, explains how attackers use identity attack pathways that consist of seemingly minor permissions and group memberships that can be chained together to enable an attacker to move laterally or escalate their access within organizations clandestinely.