Ensuring the safety of online accounts has become a critical concern for businesses and consumers alike. The increasing prevalence of cyber-attacks and data breaches makes it essential for organizations to adopt robust security measures to protect their users.
I’m Peter Fernandez, and in this article, I’m going to be looking at the various attack vectors and how protection strategies aimed at defending against a wide variety of these threats —targeting customer data as well as the typical authentication and authorization processes — can be leveraged as part of a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution.
Types of Attack
As discussed in my previous article, CIAM is a framework that enables businesses to manage customer identities, authenticate users, and authorize access to digital resources or services. It’s a framework designed to balance convenience with security, ensuring that legitimate users can access their accounts and services with minimal friction while blocking malicious actors.
Effective CIAM systems not only provide a seamless user experience but also ensure that sensitive data remains secure by implementing attack protection in a proactive manner. Cyber-attacks targeting CIAM systems can take many forms, designed to either compromise user accounts, steal sensitive data, or gain unauthorized access to internal systems.
Credential Stuffing
Credential stuffing is a form of attack where cybercriminals use stolen username and password combinations from previous data breaches to try and gain unauthorized access to user accounts. Since many users reuse passwords across multiple platforms, credential stuffing is a common and highly effective method for hackers to exploit weak security practices.
In a CIAM implementation, credential stuffing can overwhelm the login process, especially if there are no protections in place to detect and block repeated login attempts. As a result, this can lead to account takeovers, data theft, or service disruption.
Brute Force
Brute force attacks involve systematically trying every possible password combination until the correct one is found. Cybercriminals may use automated tools to carry out these attacks, testing thousands or even millions of password combinations in a short time.
The effectiveness of a brute force attack is greatly reduced by implementing countermeasures like rate limiting or account lockouts after a certain number of failed login attempts. Without these defences in place, a brute force attack could result in unauthorized access to user accounts and/or account takeover.
Phishing
Phishing attacks involve tricking users into revealing sensitive information such as UserIDs, and Passwords, by impersonating legitimate entities. These attacks can take many forms, such as fake login pages, emails, or SMS messages designed to deceive users into entering their credentials.
Vishing, a close relative to Phishing, is a similar type of attack, that relies on social engineering techniques. With Vishing, malicious voice callers attempt to extract personal information to use in some malicious activity.
CIAM implementations are often targeted by phishing schemes to steal login information or bypass authentication mechanisms. If a user is tricked into providing their credentials, it can lead to account takeovers or unauthorized access to sensitive data.
Man-in-the-Middle (MITM)
In a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker intercepts communication between the user and the CIAM system. This type of attack can allow the attacker to steal login credentials, inject malicious code, or manipulate data without the knowledge of the legitimate user or the system.
MITM attacks are particularly dangerous in situations where sensitive data, such as financial transactions or personal information, is being transmitted. CIAM systems must ensure that data is encrypted during transmission to prevent interception.
Account Takeover
Account takeover occurs when an attacker gains control of a legitimate user’s account, usually through methods like phishing, credential stuffing, or exploiting weak passwords. Once the attacker has control, they can access sensitive data, perform fraudulent transactions, or even alter account details.
Attack Protection Mechanisms
CIAM systems must have mechanisms in place to detect unusual account activity and prevent unauthorized changes to user profiles, especially in cases where an attacker has successfully obtained a valid set of credentials.
Given the variety of attacks targeting customer identities and data, security policies enforcing rules around password strength, multi-factor authentication, and other security protocols are important, and a multi-layered approach to attack protection within your CIAM implementation is particularly beneficial.
Effective attack protection not only secures sensitive data but also enhances the overall user experience by preventing unauthorized access without causing unnecessary friction for legitimate users.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a security measure that requires users to provide two or more verification factors to authenticate their identity. In addition to something the user knows (like a password), MFA typically requires something the user has (such as a mobile device or hardware token) or something the user is (such as biometric data).
MFA significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access because even if an attacker obtains a user’s password, they would still need to bypass the second factor to gain access. MFA is one of the most effective tools in preventing account takeovers, especially when combined with other protective measures.
IP Throttling
When attacks happen they often come from a consistent IP address or IP address range. In many cases, these are also well-known as sources where attacks originate. Being able to identify such suspicious IPs, and do so in an autonomous fashion, provides signal information that can be used to dynamically restrict potentially dangerous traffic.
Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is the practice of restricting the number of login attempts within a certain time frame. This can help defend against brute force and credential stuffing attacks by slowing down attackers who try to guess passwords or repeatedly submit login attempts.
CAPTCHA
The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart — or CAPTCHA, for short — is often used in conjunction with rate limiting to differentiate between human users and automated bots. CAPTCHA challenges, such as identifying distorted text or images, make it much harder for automated scripts to execute mass login attempts.
Breached Password Detection
Reusing credentials where the Password has already been breached – i.e. cracked by one or more malicious actors – is far more susceptible to account takeover and/or loss of data. Detecting a breached password credential and preventing it from being used is critical to mitigating such an attack.
Password breaches are typically a result of attacks on external systems, where user information is maliciously obtained due to poor security hygiene or a lack of effective attack protection (such as encryption).
Behavioral Analytics
Behavioural analytics uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze user behaviour and identify patterns indicative of suspicious activity. For example, if a user suddenly logs in from an unusual location or at an abnormal time, the system may trigger additional authentication steps to verify the user’s identity.
Risk-based Authentication
Risk-based authentication — another type of mechanism that can benefit from machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques — helps ensure that legitimate users have a seamless experience while adding extra layers of security for potentially high-risk actions or suspicious logins.
Encryption
To prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, CIAM integrations must use encryption to protect data both at rest and in transit.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the standard protocol used to encrypt communication between user devices and back-end systems/APIs, ensuring that sensitive data and personal information cannot be intercepted by attackers.
Additionally, implementations should ensure that passwords are stored securely using encryption techniques such as hashing, which converts passwords into a secure, irreversible format.
Monitoring
Continuous monitoring of user accounts for signs of unusual activity can help identify and mitigate potential account takeovers before they escalate. CIAM systems can employ protection measures such as alerting users to suspicious activity, requiring additional verification steps if abnormal login attempts are detected, or even temporarily locking accounts to prevent further damage.
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