Identity attack surface management (IASM)

What is identity attack surface management?

Identity attack surface management is the process of identifying all identities in an environment and understanding how they can be abused. This includes human users, privileged accounts, service accounts, applications, and non-human identities, along with their permissions, group memberships, and authentication paths.

IASM treats identity as a primary attack surface. Instead of focusing only on endpoints or networks, it maps how attackers can log in, escalate privileges, and move between systems using valid credentials. The goal is to make identity-related risks visible, measurable, and actionable.

Why is identity the primary attack surface today?

Modern attacks rarely start with malware alone. Attackers log in using stolen or abused credentials, then exploit excessive privileges, weak authentication, and hidden trust relationships. Cloud adoption, hybrid directories, and SaaS sprawl have expanded the number of identities and increased complexity.

Without centralized visibility, organizations lose track of who has access to what, which accounts are dormant, and where privileges are excessive. Identity becomes the easiest and quietest path to sensitive data.

What risks does IASM help uncover?

IASM focuses on risks that traditional security tools often miss. These include overprivileged users, stale or orphaned accounts, weak password policies, misconfigured directory permissions, and indirect access through nested groups or trust relationships.

It also highlights high-risk identity behaviors, such as abnormal logons, privilege escalation patterns, and misuse of service accounts. By exposing these conditions, IASM enables teams to prioritize remediation based on real exposure.

How does identity attack surface management work?

IASM continuously collects and correlates identity data from directories, cloud identity providers, and connected systems. It builds a contextual view of identities, privileges, and access paths, then evaluates them against security best practices.

Effective IASM solutions provide risk scoring, change tracking, and actionable insights so teams can reduce exposure without disrupting business operations. Automation is often used to support cleanup, access reviews, and policy enforcement.

Use cases

• Healthcare: Helps identify excessive access to patient data, stale accounts tied to former staff, and risky privilege combinations that could lead to data exposure or compliance violations in clinical systems.
• Financial services: Uncovers toxic permission combinations, unmanaged privileged accounts, and weak authentication paths that could be abused to access financial systems or enable fraud.
• Manufacturing: Provides visibility into identity sprawl, legacy accounts, and indirect access paths across hybrid IT and OT environments that attackers could exploit to disrupt operations or steal intellectual property.
• SaaS-driven enterprises: Maps identities and permissions across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem systems to reduce shadow access, eliminate stale entitlements, and enforce least privilege consistently.

How Netwrix can help

Netwrix helps organizations reduce identity attack surface by providing deep visibility into identity configurations, permissions, and risky behaviors across hybrid environments. By connecting identity, access, and activity data, Netwrix enables teams to see where identity risk exists and take action quickly.

Netwrix solutions support continuous assessment of identity posture, detection of risky changes, and enforcement of least privilege through auditing, analysis, and automation. This pragmatic approach helps security and IT teams reduce exposure without adding unnecessary complexity.