Identity Monitoring Explained

Introduction to identity monitoring

The proliferation of cloud services and hybrid IT environments has expanded the identity attack surface, increasing the risk of credential theft, privilege misuse, and lateral movement by adversaries.

Users end up with multiple digital identities—usually a corporate email address with single sign-on (SSO)—each with different roles, levels of access, and identities that a user can assume with a disparate set of credentials.

Each identity in a system adds to an organization’s attack surface, representing a vector through which attackers can compromise systems to leak sensitive data or install ransomware. To prevent identity-based attacks, organizations must implement continuous identity monitoring to detect suspicious access patterns and enforce real-time security controls.

This article explores identity monitoring, its key components, its benefits and challenges, and what organizations can do to protect their digital identities.

What is identity monitoring?

Identity monitoring is the continuous analysis of authentication activity, access patterns, and privilege changes to detect identity-based threats and prevent unauthorized access.

When attackers compromise user credentials, they often escalate privileges, move laterally within the network, or exploit cloud misconfigurations to gain persistent access. Identity monitoring detects these deviations in real-time to stop threats before they spread. Identity monitoring establishes the baseline of normal user activity to identify these attack signifiers and can trigger automatic responses when a deviation from the baseline occurs. 

Active identity monitoring plays a central role in safeguarding against identity theft, as it:

• Mitigates account-related risk by helping to catch identity theft or unauthorized access in the moment, instead of as part of a postmortem days or weeks later. 
• Protects sensitive information and critical systems by limiting the damage an attacker can perform with a compromised account.

Core functions

Effective identity monitoring solutions help organizations define normal user behavior, detect suspicious activity, and address threats like account compromise. Let’s break down each of the three core functions of identity monitoring to understand how they work in practice. 

#1: Establishing a baseline for normal behavior (acquiring a “pulse”) 

Identity monitoring solutions establish a regular pattern for user behavior. This pattern, also known as a “pulse”, is the baseline used to detect deviations that may indicate a threat. An identity monitoring solution analyzes authentication patterns, access locations, device trust levels, and privilege usage to establish a behavioral baseline and assign risk scores to deviations from normal activity.

#2: Monitoring access permissions and changes to privileges

In addition to establishing a baseline, identity monitoring tracks any changes to the established pulse, such as increases in access permissions or changes to privilege allocations. This is useful even in cases where no active account-related attack occurs. For example, a user increasing privilege on an identity to access sensitive credit card information in a PCI-compliant system is important to note, even if an employee did so legitimately.

#3: Identifying signs of credential abuse or account compromise

The last core function of identity monitoring involves detecting signs of credential abuse or account compromise. This includes abnormal login times for the user or a user changing their privileges in a way they never have before, which can be an indicator of a privilege escalation attack.

The 4 components of identity monitoring

While there are different identity monitoring tools organizations can implement, all effective identity monitoring solutions must include the following key capabilities. 

1. Real-time detection

Real-time detection capabilities trigger alerts for suspicious behavior as it occurs. The monitoring is continuous—for example, following an audit stream from an identity provider. This enables real-time response actions, such as blocking suspicious sessions, revoking compromised credentials, and enforcing adaptive authentication for high-risk users.

2. Behavioral analysis 

Behavior analysis identifies baseline patterns for each user and tracks a range of behaviors, including the time of day a user logs in, how long the user is in the system, and the level of access used. This baseline can then be used to determine outliers. Identity monitoring tools use these patterns to detect anomalies—when the identity acts in a way that doesn’t match the baseline—and either raises an alert or blocks the abnormal behavior.

3. Access control and privilege management

Identity monitoring utilizes the principle of least privilege (PoLP) by detecting unauthorized privilege escalations, reducing attack surface, and ensuring users have only the necessary access. It also ensures that access rights are reviewed and adjusted regularly. Through identity monitoring, IT departments enhance their ability to view and manage the controls for user identities across the organization. Additionally, identity monitoring tools can enforce strict policies for privileged/root-level accounts to reduce the risk of privileged account compromise leading to a high-impact incident. 

4. Seamless identity and access management (IAM) integration

A good identity monitoring tool should integrate seamlessly with an identity and access management (IAM) system. This allows security teams to coordinate actions when locking accounts or flagging high-risk behaviors. IAM systems are crucial for managing access to IT systems, and a misconfiguration of IAM permissions represents a serious threat to private information. 

Business benefits of identity monitoring

Identity monitoring is an important aspect of modern enterprise security. It directly complements other key security objectives and mitigates multiple real-world risks. This brings specific benefits.

Enhanced security posture 

Identity-based attacks have become so prevalent, they are causing bankruptcy fears among organizations. Real-time detection stops adversaries before they can establish persistence, preventing privilege abuse, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. By locking down identities that perform aberrantly or escalate their privileges in novel ways, organizations are more resilient to this form of attack. 

Compliance and audit readiness

GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 all have procedures and standards related to data protection. Using an identity monitoring system shows auditors and customers adherence to regulations to secure user and organizational data from identity-based attacks. Identity monitoring solutions automate compliance reporting by tracking identity activity logs, access control changes, and security policy enforcement—simplifying audits for frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2.

Streamlined IT and security operations 

Tools that operate in real time enhance visibility into what steps were taken by each identity, making incident response swifter and more effective. Identity monitoring also reduces security team workloads. Without an identity monitoring solution, security teams are left to manually review audit logs and respond reactively to security incidents.

Challenges and limitations

While identity monitoring is useful, it isn’t a security panacea. In this section, we’ll consider the common challenges and limitations that can reduce identity monitoring effectiveness. 

False positives and false negatives

Organizations need to be cautious with tool selection due to the challenges identity monitoring presents. High volumes of false positives and false negatives can reduce confidence in the tool. Organizations must balance the sensitivity and accuracy of alerts. AI-driven analytics continuously refine risk detection models, reducing false positives while improving detection of emerging identity threats.

Scalability issues

As an organization’s IT infrastructure grows, so too does the volume of identities needing to be monitored across various systems (multi-cloud, on-premises, etc.). An identity monitoring solution needs to be able to handle large volumes of data in complex environments, so the tool scales with an organization’s needs. That way, organizations are not forced to switch and relearn tools as they grow.

Integration complexity

Identity monitoring tools also present integration complexity. Modern identity security solutions integrate natively with IAM, EDR, and SIEM platforms, ensuring full visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Otherwise, it will remain a silo of data that is ultimately not usable by security teams or useful to an organization.

To deal with this, organizations need a tool that can handle integration complexity and can support all the different types of identities used by their organization.

Protect your digital identities with CrowdStrike

Identity-based attacks continue to rise, with adversaries using stolen credentials and MFA bypass techniques to infiltrate organizations. Proactive identity monitoring detects and prevents these threats before they escalate. Identity monitoring solutions protect systems by analyzing user behavior in real time while integrating with IAM systems and access controls to identify attacks and mitigate threats. 

To protect your digital identities at scale, CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection delivers real-time identity threat detection, proactive risk mitigation, and automated response capabilities to stop adversaries before they can exploit compromised credentials. It provides enhanced visibility across IT systems to detect anomalies related to identities and privilege levels, as well as securing credentials used by digital identities. CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection also seamlessly integrates with your existing security infrastructure, so you can be up and running with minimal disruption, strengthening your defenses and security posture.