Identity is the New Perimeter: How Exposed Accounts Forecast Incidents

Identity is now a primary battleground for defenders. In 2025, Verizon reported that 88% of web application attacks began with leaked credentials. In 2024, they said that for the past 10 years 1 out of 3 breaches involved leaked credentials, revealing how leaked credentials are becoming an even more dominant entry point for attackers.

Federal agencies are rethinking identity architectures, industry coverage is flagging it as the frontline, and 69% of consumers are concerned AI-driven identity fraud.

For hackers, there is no easier way to attack an account than to log in as an approved user. With authorized login details, security teams’ traditional defense mechanisms, such as endpoint detection, struggle to identify fraudulent access. While it may recognize an unusual geostamp, it may just as easily raise the same alarm for an employee working from a new cafe. Furthermore, hackers heavily rely on proxies to impersonate any origin and they are available all over the world.

Security teams are drowning in alerts and missing the threats that count. As BYOD and remote work continue to rise, with nearly 70% of organizations implementing BYOD policies by 2024, up from 60% in 2023, legitimate and fraudulent login attempts are nearly indistinguishable.

Every year, massive data breaches harm the public. Credential theft via infostealers jumped 800% in 2025. This is a type of malware or malicious software engineered to extract saved logins, cookies, payment information, crypto wallets, and autofill records from browsers.

Earlier this year, researchers uncovered the largest credential leak on record— 16 billion unique logins from major platforms, including Google, Microsoft, GitHub, , and Telegram, spread across 30 aggregated datasets on underground forums.

Hackers can use the information in different ways. They can assume people's identities and craft convincing phishing attacks, escalate privileges, and move laterally into systems to inject malware or disable security. If they find their way to payment information or access to payroll, they can even transfer funds and make unauthorized transactions or demand ransom in return for the sensitive data. This was the case with the 2024 Snowflake campaign . Cybercriminals used stolen credentials to access customer environments, stole terabytes of data, and then demanded ransom payments to prevent public leaks, a now classic extortion scheme.

Since conventional tools like endpoint detection often miss attackers using legitimate credentials, security teams need to shift their defenses further upstream—where those stolen credentials first circulate.

Threat exposure management is rising in popularity; the market was valued at $1.99 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.3% from 2024 to 2032, and for good reason.

Within TEM, we have: dark web monitoring, attack surface management, and an emerging sector which Flare is coining “identity exposure management”.

The explosion of cloud adoption, IoT devices, and remote work is dramatically expanding attack surfaces. Enterprises are ramping up their deployment of sophisticated tools to detect security vulnerabilities prior to exploitation and automate vulnerability detection and remediation.

While gaining complete access to breach data is often limited due to its sensitive nature, identity exposure management tools protect organizational data without needing such access. Instead, organizations can work with IEM providers to detect exposed credentials and organizational data on illicit deep, dark, and clear web and Telegram channels. The latest versions of IEM software will instantly remediate the vulnerability by validating leaked credentials, automating remediation workflows, and slashing threat response times (MTTR).

Compromised credentials, excessive privileges, shadow accounts, and stale access are all increasingly serious technical risks. According to Orca Security’s 2025 State of Cloud Security Report, 84% of organizations use AI in the cloud, with 32% of assets in a “neglected state” or not properly managed, and an average of 115 vulnerabilities per asset. Leadership must be clued in with a clear understanding of how these vulnerabilities impact business KPIs — cost, risk, and resilience.

Every identity exposure is an access point waiting to be leveraged. The length of time it is exposed amplifies the chances of a breach. Moreover, the level of authorized access multiplies the risk. Can the exposure lead to system downtime, fraudulent transactions, customer data leak, and reputational damage?

Cybersecurity teams are using industry benchmarks and historical internal breach data to track incident costs and trend lines, allowing them to quantify the risk in dollars. Flare reported in 2025 that the average sum of labor, fraud, and customer churn costs clocked in at $68.5 million annually. Automated remediation not only saves these costs by boosting system resilience but it saves even more so by eliminating low-value repetitive tasks.

With identities now the primary attack surface, identity exposure management has become the big step in helping organizations prevent, prioritize, and remediate identity-driven threats.

The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not represent The Fast Mode. While information provided in this post is obtained from sources believed by The Fast Mode to be reliable, The Fast Mode is not liable for any losses or damages arising from any information limitations, changes, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, omissions or errors contained therein. The heading is for ease of reference and shall not be deemed to influence the information presented.

Olivier Bilodeau is a principal cybersecurity researcher at Flare. With more than 15 years of infosec experience, Olivier runs honeypots, reverse-engineers binaries, and develops RDP interception technology. He authored several important Anti-Virus industry reports like Dissecting Linux/Moose, Operation Windigo ( the Ebury malware) and Ego-Market: When Greed for Fame Benefits Large-Scale Botnets. Passionate communicator, Olivier has spoken at several conferences like RSAC USA, BlackHat USA/Europe, DefCon, 44CON, Botconf, SecTor, Derbycon, AtlSecCon and more. Invested in his community, he co-organizes MontréHack — a monthly workshop focused on applied information security —, he is NorthSec’s President and runs its Hacker Jeopardy.

Olivier Bilodeau is a principal cybersecurity researcher at Flare. With more than 15 years of infosec experience, Olivier runs honeypots, reverse-engineers binaries, and develops RDP interception technology. He authored several important Anti-Virus industry reports like Dissecting Linux/Moose, Operation Windigo ( the Ebury malware) and Ego-Market: When Greed for Fame Benefits Large-Scale Botnets. Passionate communicator, Olivier has spoken at several conferences like RSAC USA, BlackHat USA/Europe, DefCon, 44CON, Botconf, SecTor, Derbycon, AtlSecCon and more. Invested in his community, he co-organizes MontréHack — a monthly workshop focused on applied information security —, he is NorthSec’s President and runs its Hacker Jeopardy.