How Can AI-powered Solutions Enhance Identity Security?
Discover how AI-driven intelligent IAM is an essential component of your long-term cybersecurity strategy.
Against growing and ever-improving cyber threats, AI will be critical in enhancing identity security, automating tasks, and helping humans make decisions. Alan Radford of One Identity says collaboration between experts and AI will shape the future of cybersecurity.
User identities constitute one of the most extensive attack surfaces for cybercriminals. Particularly in recent years, the frequency of attacks exploiting credentials in various ways has significantly increased. It is far from easy for many companies to keep up with these evolving threats and proactively respond to them. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes into play and provides significant support for identity security and real-time detection of unknown threats. AI will enable automated responses and supplement virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.
The primary role of artificial intelligence is to augment human decision-making, ensuring accurate decisions are made at the right time. Simultaneously, AI automates numerous security, identity, and access processes. In this context, AI is not intended to replace humans but rather to simplify the tasks of security professionals.
Identity-Centric Security Breaches: The Norm, Not the Exception
According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, compromised credentials are one of the most sought-after ways for attackers to access systems, with 49% of breaches involving credentials and 74% of breaches involving a human element. Meanwhile, a One Identity survey of over 1,000 IT security professionals revealed that identity-based attacks have impacted 89%.
Attackers are targeting IT support staff and administrators to steal valuable identities. Because successfully hijacking an admin or helpdesk member’s identity results in substantial damage due to their extensive account privileges. Often, attackers themselves use artificial intelligence in such attacks. In so-called “blended threats/attacks,” automated bots based on artificial intelligence help gather the data needed for the attack. If there is sufficient information, hackers take control and launch their attacks.
Cybercriminals are also using AI to make voice deepfakes that can aid social engineering attacks (think corporate espionage or identity theft); automated vulnerability scanning to find an “open door” and map out the best attack path, using AI to identify passwords by logging the specific pitches computer keys make when typing.
Thus, two critical points are clear: credentials are more vulnerable than ever, and safeguarding them is increasingly challenging. Cybercriminals employ hacking tools that rival, if not surpass, many security products. Enterprises must uphold the necessity of upgrading their defenses. Artificial intelligence-based technologies are a promising means of combating sophisticated attacks on corporate identities.
Fight AI with AI
Where traditional security approaches are insufficient for complex identity security, AI-based solutions are the answer. Through AI technologies and machine learning (ML), security systems comprehensively capture and analyze data in both infrastructure and the cloud, enabling automated decision-making ahead of virus signatures and firewall rules take effect. Integrating identity management with AI-based technologies makes a lot of sense.
An intelligent Identity and Access Management (IAM) approach aids in identifying security risks and plugging gaps. Ultimately, this prevents production disruptions, data breaches, and more. In IAM systems protected by AI, privileges, and roles are assigned to users automatically and intelligently – and precisely for the specific areas and at the right time.
But there is something else that speaks in favor of using AI. With the increasing number of attacks on identities, large amounts of technical information must be processed, analyzed, and classified. Sooner or later, human analysts face the problem of perceiving, processing, and forming the right conclusions. AI will do this, working continuously and at an impressive speed. Quickly detect anomalies in resource access or user behavior, adapt to changes, perform predefined actions, or engage security experts where necessary.
Similar principles apply to assigned access permissions. Unused rights are automatically revoked, reducing the attack surface. Reassigning rights follows a streamlined process through AI’s automatic allocation or manual IT intervention.
Precise and Adaptive Control of Access and Intelligent Authentication
AI systems allow access control and authorization models to be accurately, quickly defined, implemented, and monitored. Traditional identifiers, on their own, cannot provide comprehensive system protection, unlike AI, which incorporates a variety of attributes. Unusual behavior and use of rights that deviate from the standard are recognized immediately. Deviations from standard behavior trigger an immediate alert. If system access poses a risk, AI quarantines endpoints as needed, adjusting based on changing risk assessments.
AI also enhances user account authentication by incorporating contextual insights, simplifying authentication while strengthening the security posture. Risk assessment AI systems use machine learning to capture a wide range of data that goes far beyond what standard credentials and Multi-Factor Authentication provide. This incorporates data from the respective location, devices, and user behavior into the risk assessment, all in real-time. In this way, every login attempt can be individually secured.
The user’s wider identity footprint will play a role in the login process, as well as the location, the device used, the app a user wants to access, and patterns in how they interact with the mouse and keyboard. If AI detects anomalies, it prompts multifactor authentication or denies access. This applies to all network access within the infrastructure and the cloud.
See More: Battling Phishing and Business Email Compromise Attacks
AI: A Supportive Partner for IT Experts
The role of AI is not to replace security experts but to provide information and actionable options. Repetitive tasks are automated, and actionable insights are provided in a predictive and prescriptive context, freeing IT specialists to focus on complex tasks and new projects. In this scenario, AI acts as a virtual assistant, rapidly identifying abnormal user behavior.
This dynamic suggests focusing more on tasks emerging from contextual insights and implementing targeted measures accordingly. The wealth of data enhances decision-making speed and quality.
Navigating the Path to Cyber Resilience
Intelligent IAM helps secure access quickly, securely, and with minimal effort. AI and IT security experts form a team that securely provides IAM within the infrastructure and, ideally, prevents attacks before they occur.
The question for the future is the extent to which artificial intelligence can be harnessed for cyber security and, specifically, identity protection. Indeed, creating a virtual personal assistant like Alexa or Siri or using generative AI and chatbots like ChatGPT will help optimize various facets of decision-making. With such tools, the incident response, which is normally manual, can be automated to a large extent and thus accelerated. This applies to processes at the endpoint as well as to specific identities.
Artificial intelligence can learn, but it will only learn as designed and trained. Nevertheless, a human expert will ultimately drive how a specific learning model is designed and implemented. This applies to the design and roadmap of security systems and to inform decision-making in the identity field.
Have you embraced AI-driven identity solutions for robust protection? What are your takeaways? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
MORE ON IDENTITY SECURITY
