Cisco has released new features for the Cisco Security Cloud as part of its effort to make security easier. Recent developments toward its goal of a single, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform include the introduction of Cisco Identity Intelligence, a first, and ongoing innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
To strengthen enterprises’ defenses against more complicated attack methods, Cisco is launching a first-of-its-kind strategy that combines identity, networking, and security.
Considering authentication and access solutions are blindly trusted today, threat actors were able to successfully compromise some of the biggest companies in the world in 2023 by focusing on these vulnerabilities. In fact, adversaries utilising compromised credentials on legitimate accounts accounted for more than 26% of all Cisco Talos Incident Response engagements in 2023.
A user’s multiple digital identities and accounts are frequently mapped to them, which greatly increases the number of entry points for attackers and the potential for lateral movement “across” identities. Too frequently, security teams are lacking critical context regarding past identity behavior, actions across systems, and current risk levels that are required to make choices about trusted access because legacy permissions have not been deleted.
Cisco Identity Intelligence offers unified visibility and AI-driven analytics by operating on top of clients’ current identity stores. Without ripping and replacing their current solutions, customers may find their whole identity population, clear up susceptible accounts, remove dangerous and underused rights, identify anomalies in behavior, and prevent high-risk access attempts.
Malicious actors are coming up with inventive ways to steal credentials, even though multifactor authentication (MFA) is still a vital first line of security against identity-based assaults. The 2024 Duo Trusted Access Report states that although the number of identity attacks is higher than ever, Cisco Duo processed 16 billion authentications in 2023—an increase of 41% per year. Weaker types of MFA, such as SMS and phone calls, experienced a decline to an all-time low of 5%.
“Identity is the fabric that connects humans, devices and applications in the workplace, and has become an easy target for modern cybersecurity attacks. Organizations need to adopt an identity-first approach to security, which among other things allows them to evolve from just asking ‘can’ a user access a system to continuously assessing whether a user ‘should’ be able to do what they are doing once they are authenticated,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “By analyzing the entire attack surface of an organization’s users, machines, services, apps, data and their behaviors, Cisco Identity Intelligence bridges the chasm between authentication and access. We are the first vendor bringing together identity, networking and security into a complete solution to address the largest cyber challenge of modern times.”
