Identity is the new attack surface: how exposure management closes the credential gap
Many successful attacks begin with an attacker signing in using legitimate credentials.
Identity is now one of the primary attack surfaces in today’s businesses. Each person within an organization, including employees, contractors, service accounts, cloud workloads, application programming interfaces (APIs), and AI agents, uses credentials to access systems and data. As organizations use more cloud services, the number of identities multiplies. This identity sprawl, spread across employees, service accounts, and cloud workloads, leaves more opportunities for attackers to gain a foothold.
The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that credential abuse was a culprit in 22% of breaches, making compromised credentials a common way for attackers to gain initial access.
Security professionals have traditionally looked after endpoints, networks, and applications. All these remain relevant today, but there is one more element that now sits at the center of all business operations: identities. A single identity with high permissions may grant a threat actor the same access as a legitimate user, helping them move around your environment without exploiting any vulnerabilities.
It is not enough just to secure your identities; you should understand which identities pose the highest risk to your business and how they relate to your assets.
That is where exposure management complements traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) by helping you prioritize the identity exposures that could realistically endanger your business.
Why is identity the new attack surface?
There are many good reasons why attackers go after identities. For instance, once an identity is compromised, attackers can automatically gain access to any systems that trust it. They can use that trusted permission to continue their activities in the system without triggering any suspicious activity, such as malware attacks.
The attack surface is much more than employees. Companies need to protect human identities, service accounts, cloud identities, machine identities, third-party identities, and even identities generated from AI.
Each of these identities comes with unique permissions and relationships, which increases the total number of credentials that need to be protected, and the number of potential paths adversaries can use.
That makes IAM a key part of exposure management. Protecting credentials is vital, but understanding which identities pose the greatest business risk is equally important.
What is the credential gap?
The credential gap is the space between when an identity is granted access and when that access is actually reviewed, restricted, or revoked.
Most identity-related incidents begin long before a password is stolen.
An administrator leaves elevated permissions in place after a project ends. A service account continues running years after its original owner leaves the company. Temporary access becomes permanent. None of these situations looks particularly dangerous on its own, but issues arise when they intersect.
Think of a threat actor compromising a weak service account, then using its unnecessary administrative rights to reach a server that stores credentials for a totally different system. A single configuration oversight becomes a direct route to valuable resources.
These chained weaknesses are viewed as toxic combinations because several individually manageable issues combine into a far more serious exposure.
Identity sprawl continues to grow as organizations adopt cloud services, software-as-a-service applications, hybrid Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID environments, machine identities, and AI-driven automation. Every new identity adds another permission set, another credential to manage, and another relationship that security teams need to understand.
Research shows just how big this problem is, noting the presence of overprivileged and unmanaged identities in enterprise cloud environments, which continue to increase the risk of identity-based threats.
No security team can manually review every identity often enough to keep pace with that growth.
How does exposure management close the gap?
Identity governance establishes who should have access to which resources. Exposure management focuses on something different: which identities currently create the greatest business risk.
That shift changes how organizations prioritize security work.
Instead of reviewing identities in isolation, exposure management considers how identities connect to systems, permissions, cloud resources, and business-critical assets. The objective is to understand how an attacker could move through the environment after compromising a credential.
Several capabilities support that approach:
- Ongoing identity inventory covering on-premises and cloud environments
- Attack path analysis reveals where compromised credentials could lead
- Identifying toxic combinations that create exploitable attack paths
- Prioritizing based on business impact, not the number of findings
The resulting context helps security teams make more intelligent decisions.
Least privilege becomes easier to apply because exposure data identifies the accounts that require attention instead of treating every privileged identity as equally urgent.
Just-in-time (JIT) access also benefits. Enterprises are able to apply temporary privilege controls to only those identities that are part of the attack path and not all administrative identities.
How do you measure progress in business terms?
Boards rarely want another report listing thousands of privileged accounts.
They want to know whether the organization’s exposure is increasing or decreasing and whether security investments are reducing business risk.
Meaningful measurements answer those questions. Examples include:
- Drop in high-risk identity exposures over time
- Percentage of privileged identities operating under least privilege
- Number of toxic combinations eliminated
- Reduction in exploitable identity attack paths
- Time required to discover and remediate identity exposures
These measurements help determine whether security personnel are mitigating actual risks rather than just checking boxes.
They can even help in having better conversations with senior management. You make a stronger case to the board when you can prove a measurable reduction in attack vectors instead of a headcount of total users or a tally of permission reviews completed that quarter.
In light of the increasing number of cloud services, machine identities, and AI agents joining your business environments each year, the number of privileged users is irrelevant to the board. Only by measuring how exposure shrinks over time can you demonstrate improvement in IAM.
