Zero Trust principles are now commonplace in enterprise infrastructure; organizations have spent years investing in measures that secure identities and systems against sophisticated attacks.
However, human error is still a readily exploitable path into even hardened organizations, particularly where trust is established manually. Onboarding and service desk processes are a natural pressure point where agents may need to make high-impact access decisions with limited context, while attackers only need to convince one person that they are who they claim to be.
For an established user, agents have plenty of ways to verify identity. A new employee typically hasn’t set those verification methods up, but the organization still needs to establish trust. And if the initial check is weak, the controls that follow cannot fix it.
Organizations therefore need robust methods to confidently verify identity and close the gaps that attackers are increasingly targeting.
The Fraudulent Identity Problem
The FBI has repeatedly warned that North Korean IT workers are using stolen or fraudulent identities to secure remote jobs and gain access to corporate networks. In some cases, workers have used false identity documents, proxy infrastructure and US-based facilitators to make themselves appear to be legitimate applicants.