The critical identity vulnerabilities that exist outside your technology stack — where process breakdowns, human decisions, and governance gaps create exploitable attack surfaces
What This Category Represents
Captures the non-technical identity failures that directly enable real-world breaches. These aren't platform bugs or configuration errors — they're systemic breakdowns in how organizations manage identity lifecycles, enforce accountability, and maintain operational discipline.
Attackers don't always need exploits. They simply take advantage of weak governance structures, inconsistent processes, and human error patterns that organizations leave exposed.
Governance
Framework gaps
Access Lifecycle
Process failures
Ownership
Accountability void
Governance failure is itself an attack surface — one that attackers exploit more frequently than technical vulnerabilities.
Critical Human Error Patterns
1
Incorrect Role Assignments
Admins accidentally assign privileged or high-risk roles during routine provisioning. Impact: Instant privilege escalation without any technical exploitation required.
2
Failure to Remove Access
Temporary permissions granted for specific tasks become permanent fixtures. Impact: Attacker persistence via forgotten access paths that no one remembers granting.
3
Missing Access Reviews
No periodic validation of groups, roles, app permissions, or service principal rights. Impact: Unchecked identity drift that compounds over months and years.
4
No Separation of Duties
Admins combine incompatible roles across sensitive domains without oversight. Impact: One compromised account leads to total environment compromise.
Process & Framework Failures
Manual Identity Decisions
Over-reliance on manual approvals, provisioning, and lifecycle steps.
Impact: Inconsistency and preventable mistakes that create security gaps.
Weak IAM Governance
Unclear workflows for access requests, reviews, and privileged access management.
Impact: Chaotic privilege landscape with no clear ownership.
Unjustified Privileges
Privileged access granted without documented business justification or approval chain.
Impact: Unjustified admin rights exploited silently over extended periods.
Incomplete Offboarding
Former employees, contractors, and vendors remain active in systems after departure.
Identity Concept Confusion
Admins confuse app roles, service principals, token claims, and federation mappings.
Control Bypassing
Admins disable MFA, reuse credentials, or skip PIM steps for convenience.
Visibility & Detection Gaps
Failure to Detect Identity Drift
Privilege growth over months and years remains invisible to security teams. Roles accumulate. Permissions expand. Access never contracts. Impact: Excessive access becomes normalized as "business as usual" — creating a massive attack surface hidden in plain sight.
Unclear Ownership
No designated owner for SaaS applications, service principals, admin groups, or cloud resources. Impact: Zero accountability means misconfigurations are never identified, investigated, or corrected. Security issues persist indefinitely.
Multi-Cloud Governance Gaps
Different security rules and maturity levels across Azure, AWS, GCP, and SaaS platforms. Impact: Inconsistent enforcement creates exploitable gaps in multi-cloud environments where attackers find the weakest link.
Credential & Training Failures
Poor Credential Hygiene
Credentials stored in team chats, personal notes, screenshots, shared documents, and wiki pages. Service account passwords in plaintext. API keys committed to repositories. Recovery codes saved in email.
Impact: Easy credential theft from insecure storage locations that administrators consider "convenient" but attackers consider "treasure troves."
Insufficient IAM Training
Admins and application owners lack deep understanding of identity architecture. They misunderstand roles, create bad SSO configurations, and maintain poor security posture.
Impact: Identity architecture becomes accidentally exploitable through well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed decisions.
78%
Credential Exposure
Organizations with credential hygiene issues
62%
Training Gap
Admins lacking formal IAM training
Identity Attack Chain Impact
Governance and human failures significantly impact multiple stages of the attack progression:
1
Stage 2: Identity Enumeration
Poor governance enables attackers to discover privileged accounts and service principals
2
Stage 3: Credential Acquisition
Weak credential hygiene provides easy access to stored credentials and API keys
3
Stage 4: Authentication Abuse
Bypassed controls and disabled MFA create unprotected authentication paths
4
Stage 5: Privilege Escalation
Incorrect role assignments and missing SoD enable immediate privilege elevation
5
Stage 7: Lateral Movement
Forgotten access and identity drift provide pathways across environment boundaries
6
Stage 8: Persistence
Incomplete offboarding and unreviewed access create long-term attacker footholds
Technology cannot compensate for weak governance. No security tool can fix broken processes, unclear ownership, or inconsistent human decisions.
Human error is predictable, not random
Organizations that treat human error as unpredictable chaos will never solve it. Treat it as a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions.
Attackers weaponize governance gaps
Modern attackers exploit governance failures more frequently than technical vulnerabilities. They know where process breaks down.
Identity security is holistic
Effective identity security requires people, process, architecture, and controls working together — not technology alone.
This category is essential for any mature identity security program. Understanding these failure modes is the first step toward building resilient governance.