Identity protection in fighting cyber attacks
As cyberattacks become more widespread and more destructive, new approaches to protecting enterprises are critically important. Spera, an Israeli security startup, is announcing a new cloud-based identity security posture management platform to meet that need. The company provides end-to-end management of identity attack surface as well as risk reduction and prevention, detection and response to identity threats.
According to the company, the Spera platform uses a list of identities that are available across cloud and on-premises environments. The inventory operates in real time and is constantly updated and is risk and context based. The identity list is important because most current attacks are identity-based in one form or another. This is especially true in attacks that begin with phishing, which is itself an identity attack.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report, identity-based attacks involving compromised credentials and phishing were the two most common and costliest attack vectors of 2022.
To be useful, a security product or service must be used, which means that enterprises need to be assured that the cost of providing the service is reasonable, which means that it must provide a reasonable return on investment.
“Spera was founded on a model of improving ROI from day one,” explained Dor Fledel, CEO of Spera. “Within an hour of deployment, Spera generates a comprehensive report on the state of your identity security with actionable insights. With high accuracy and easy remediation, Spera fixes over 75% of critical issues on average within the first weeks of deployment helps to solve.
The company said that Spera uses a “trust-but-verify” approach to identity protection.
And that it empowers security teams to leverage identity as a business force by ensuring that the identity security perimeter is not compromised by ineffective processes or human error.
Spera says it uses automation to proactively uncover identity risks and their context, allowing security teams to focus on what matters most based on user correlation, identity analysis and usage patterns Is.
To do this Spera puts the identity and access management team under control by automatically building a real-time, comprehensive identity inventory of all users, identities, applications, environments and their rich context in one interface. Spera then aggregates, correlates, and normalizes all permissions, uses, and changes made to your identity stack.
primary sources
Management of security platforms
“We integrate with three primary data sources,” explained Fledel. “The first is the identity stack and identity provider, such as Okta or Active Directory.”
“The second piece is the applications themselves. We plug into the applications and understand the permission model, what users have done and where they have access, as well as the greatest risks in the applications,” he said. Fledel said Spera provides the subject matter expertise that businesses need to understand permissions and roles in applications that are not standardized.
“The third data source is additional context, meaning data that is not in the previous two sources.” He added that there can be HR systems that reflect business logic as well as other parts of the identity stack. Fladell said this information allows for the automation of complex tasks such as off-boarding, where multiple permissions and other access requirements have to be handled quickly and accurately.
Fledel said a key difference between Spera and other similar solutions is that Spera doesn’t assume that business has good security hygiene.
“One of the reasons we integrate applications is to see what’s really under the hood and what’s beyond formal approval processes,” Fledel said. “And based on what we’ve seen in the market, those things actually do pose a significant amount of risk because not only are they unmanaged, they’re also privileged and don’t have multi-factor authentication.”
It is because of these issues that Sapera emphasizes identity security posture management. He added that this helps organizations reduce the risk profile in their identity stack. “We’ve found based on a lot of conversations with CISOs and identity teams that they say their identity maturity is relatively low,” he explained.
“One of the things we’re helping with is solving an organizational problem,” Fledel said. “This includes the context of different identities, what they are used for and whether they are needed. Today it is not just a technical problem that is distributed among different systems in the organization, it is also a problem between different people in the organization. is distributed.”
