Why Identity Is the Starting Point for Most Modern Security Incidents

When security incidents are investigated after the fact, a familiar pattern often emerges: The breach didn’t start with malware or lateral movement. It started with identity abuse.

Compromised credentials, abused MFA, and misused privileges are now the most common entry points for attackers. Yet, identity alerts are among the most misunderstood and least effectively investigated signals in security operations.

The Shift from Malware to Identity Abuse

Modern attacks prioritize:

• Stolen credentials
• MFA fatigue and push bombing
• Token theft
• Privilege escalation through legitimate access

This shift isn’t accidental. Identity-based attacks often blend in with normal user behavior, bypass many traditional controls, and generate alerts that appear low severity in isolation. For attackers, identity is the quietest path in.

Why Identity Alerts Are So Easy to Dismiss

Identity platforms generate a high volume of events:

• Failed authentication attempts
• MFA challenges
• Login anomalies
• Administrative changes

Individually, many of these look benign.

Without investigation, teams struggle to answer:

• Is this a user mistake or an attack?
• Is this behavior consistent with past activity?
• Is this account high risk or low impact?
• Does this require containment now or monitoring later?

As a result, identity alerts are often automatically closed, treated as helpdesk issues, and ignored until impact occurs.

MFA Fatigue Is a Perfect Example

MFA fatigue (or push bombing) illustrates the problem clearly. A single MFA push might mean nothing. Repeated pushes over time, especially from unusual locations or devices, often indicate active attack attempts.

Without correlation and context, patterns go unnoticed, the attacks persist, and access is eventually granted. Identity alerts are rarely dangerous alone. They become dangerous when patterns are missed.

Identity Signals Are Early Indicators, Only If You Know How to Read Them

Identity-based alerts often precede:

• Privilege escalation
• Lateral movement
• Data access
• Ransomware deployment

But only if teams:

• Investigate authentication behavior over time
• Correlate identity events with user risk and access level
• Understand what “normal” looks like for that identity

This requires structured investigation workflows.

Why Detection-Only Identity Monitoring Fails

Many identity detections fire because a rule was triggered and not because an incident is confirmed. Detection-only approaches force teams to guess the intent, rely on static thresholds, and treat identity risk as binary (good vs bad). In reality, identity risk exists on a spectrum and changes over time. Without investigation, teams will miss escalation signals, which will cause delayed response and the attack to progress quietly.

Identity Incidents Are Operational Problems

Organizations often treat identity risk as:

• An IAM configuration issue
• A user behavior issue
• A policy tuning problem

But identity abuse is an incident response problem.

It requires:

• Evidence-based investigation
• Clear decision criteria
• Timely, controlled response

Until identity incidents are handled with the same rigor as endpoint or network incidents, they will remain the most effective attack vector.

What Comes Next

If identity alerts are early indicators of compromise, the next challenge is clear: How do teams investigate and respond without relying entirely on manual effort?

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at why manual incident response doesn’t scale, and how human bottlenecks create risk even when alerts are accurate.