59% percent of confirmed breaches are now identity-driven, according to eSentire’s 2025 research. That number should give every security leader pause. Attackers no longer need to find a software vulnerability or write custom malware. They log in with stolen credentials. From that moment forward, they appear to be any other trusted user on the network.
The third-party dimension makes this trend more alarming. Your vendors, contractors, and service providers all maintain some degree of access to your environment. When one of their identities gets compromised, that breach becomes your problem fast. The attacker isn’t breaking through your firewall. They’re walking through the front door with someone else’s badge.
What Are Identity-Based Attacks?
Identity-based attacks compromise, steal, or misuse legitimate credentials to gain unauthorized access. No exploit kit is required, no malware dropper is deployed, and no zero-day is needed. The attacker obtains a valid credential and uses it to navigate an environment as a real user would.
These attacks target two broad categories of identities. Human identities include employee accounts, contractor logins, and partner credentials. Non-human identities (NHIs) cover service accounts, API tokens, machine-to-machine keys, and automated workflow credentials.
NHIs attract adversaries at a disproportionate rate. They tend to have elevated privileges, get rotated less often, and rarely receive the same level of auditing scrutiny as human accounts.
Microsoft’s security team captured this shift well in March 2026. They noted that identity attacks now depend less on who gets compromised and more on what that identity can access. Gartner backed that view by naming Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) a top security priority for 2026. When an attacker already holds a valid set of keys, perimeter defenses become irrelevant.
Common Types of Identity-Based Attacks
Not all identity-based attacks look the same, but each one exploits a shared weakness: trust in a valid credential.
Credential stuffing takes leaked username-and-password combinations from previous breaches and automates login attempts across platforms.
Phishing and Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) campaigns lure users into entering credentials on fake login pages. Modern PhaaS kits are sophisticated enough to intercept multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes in real time.
Session hijacking through infostealers takes a different path. It harvests active browser cookies from compromised endpoints to take over already-authenticated sessions without a password or MFA token.
Non-human identity (NHI) compromises target service accounts, API keys, and machine tokens that are often long-lived, over-privileged, and largely unmonitored.
Third-party and supply chain identity attacks represent the fastest-growing vector. Forty-nine percent of initial access events in 2024 involved valid credentials, according to eSentire’s TRU intelligence. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that 30% of breaches now involve a third party. When a vendor’s credentials are compromised, your internal defenses may never flag the intrusion.
Third-party identity risk has become one of the fastest-growing and hardest-to-detect threat categories in enterprise security.
| Attack type | Entry vector | Bypasses MFA? |
|---|---|---|
| Credential stuffing | Leaked credentials from prior breaches | No (if MFA is present) |
| Phishing / PhaaS | Fake login pages capturing credentials live | Yes (intercepts OTP) |
| Session hijacking | Stolen browser session cookies | Yes (post-authentication) |
| NHI compromise | Exposed API keys, over-privileged service accounts | Often N/A (MFA rarely applied) |
| Third-party identity attack | Compromised vendor or contractor credentials | Depends on vendor controls |
What these methods share is that the attacker never needs to defeat your security stack head-on. They slip past defenses by looking like someone who already belongs.
How Identity-Based Attacks Work
A typical identity-based attack moves through four stages. It begins with credential acquisition, where the attacker obtains valid credentials through phishing, infostealer malware, dark web purchases, or a misconfigured NHI. In many cases, the credential belongs to a third-party vendor whose security posture is weaker than the target organization’s. The attacker then uses that credential for initial access, logging in and triggering no alerts from security tooling.
From there, lateral movement begins. The attacker escalates privileges, maps internal resources, and expands their foothold. Average dwell time during this phase exceeds 200 days across multiple industry benchmarks. Attackers can continue undetected for months before discovery. The final stage is impact — whether that takes the form of data exfiltration, ransomware deployment, or persistent backdoor installation.
Consider a concrete scenario. A staffing agency contractor with virtual private network (VPN) access falls for a phishing email. The attacker captures the contractor’s session token, logs into the VPN, and pivots into the enterprise network. Internal security tools see a trusted contractor connecting from an expected IP range, so nothing looks out of place. Nothing raises a flag until data starts moving to an external destination. That scenario captures the core difficulty of third-party risk management. The threat enters through a weakness your team never controlled.
The Complete Guide to Building an Identity Protection Strategy
Understanding how these attacks work is one thing. Building defenses that actually stop them requires focused, ongoing action across five areas. A mature identity security strategy accounts for both internal accounts and every external identity that touches your environment.
Inventory every identity across your environment. You may dramatically undercount your identities, particularly NHIs. Catalog all human accounts, service accounts, API tokens, and shared credentials. You can’t protect identities you don’t know about.
Enforce least privilege. Trim standing access to only what each identity needs for its specific function. Remove dormant accounts and rotate service account credentials regularly. Least privilege limits the blast radius when a credential gets compromised.
Extend Your Defenses Beyond the Perimeter
Deploy phishing-resistant MFA everywhere. Traditional SMS or one-time password (OTP)-based MFA is better than nothing, but adversary-in-the-middle attacks can defeat it. FIDO2 hardware keys and passkeys resist interception far better and should be the default for all privileged access.
Continuously monitor for exposed credentials. Stolen credentials surface on dark web marketplaces and underground forums every day. Automated credential monitoring catches exposures before attackers can weaponize them, buying your team critical response time.
Extend identity controls to third parties. Your vendor’s identity hygiene is part of your attack surface. Ask vendors about their MFA policies, credential rotation practices, and offboarding processes. As IBM’s X-Force team noted in their 2026 Threat Intelligence Index, chief information security officers (CISOs) must treat vulnerability patching and identity hardening as parallel priorities. The same logic applies to every identity that touches your environment, whether it belongs to your organization or a partner’s.
Strengthen Identity Security With TITAN AI
Knowing what to do and executing it across hundreds of vendor relationships at scale are two very different problems. Manual monitoring, spreadsheet-based inventories, and annual questionnaire cycles simply can’t match the speed at which stolen credentials get weaponized.
SecurityScorecard’s TITAN AI was built to close that gap. TITAN Watch delivers continuous foundational visibility into your entire vendor ecosystem, surfacing credential exposures and risky access patterns you didn’t know existed. TITAN Assess automates third-party risk workflows so your team spends less time chasing questionnaires and more time acting on real risk signals. TITAN Secure maps Internet Intelligence data — active threat actor signals, adversary infrastructure, and active infections — directly to your vendor ecosystem, connecting vendor risk to active threats before they reach you.
The numbers back it up. Organizations using TITAN AI see a 95% reduction in manual TPRM tasks and up to a 75% reduction in supply-chain breaches. Seventy percent of Fortune 500 companies trust SecurityScorecard to protect their vendor ecosystems.
As our CEO Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy has said: “Many teams still spend too much time stuck in manual, compliance-driven processes that don’t actually reduce risk. TITAN AI is our answer to that problem.”
Request a demo to see how TITAN AI works in your environment.
Identity-Based Attacks FAQs
What Is an Example of an Identity-Based Attack?
Credential stuffing is one of the most common examples. Attackers take lists of leaked usernames and passwords from prior data breaches and automate login attempts across multiple platforms. The credentials are real, so these attacks frequently bypass standard security controls without raising any flags.
How Do Identity-Based Attacks Differ From Traditional Cyberattacks?
Traditional cyberattacks exploit software vulnerabilities or deploy malware to gain access. Identity-based attacks exploit legitimate credentials, allowing the attacker to appear as a trusted user. That distinction makes detection far more difficult with conventional security tools.
Can MFA Stop Identity-Based Attacks?
MFA raises the bar, but it’s not a complete answer. Adversary-in-the-Middle phishing kits and infostealer malware can capture session cookies after MFA completes, allowing attackers to hijack already-authenticated sessions without needing the second factor.
Why Are Third-Party Vendors a Major Identity Risk?
Vendors and contractors frequently hold privileged access to enterprise systems, but their identity security practices sit outside your direct control. A compromised vendor credential creates a trusted entry point into your environment that your own detection systems may never flag.
What Is Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)?
ITDR is a security discipline focused on detecting and responding to threats targeting identity infrastructure, including users, credentials, and entitlements. Unlike perimeter-focused security tools, ITDR monitors identity behavior in real time to catch misuse before it escalates into a full breach.
How Does SecurityScorecard Help Prevent Identity-Based Attacks From Third Parties?
Our TITAN AI platform delivers continuous, outside-in monitoring of your entire vendor ecosystem. It surfaces credential exposures, compromised accounts, and risky access patterns before they become incidents, giving your team the visibility to act before attackers do.
