In the modern enterprise, identity has become the new endpoint. The traditional focus on securing physical devices and network perimeters is no longer sufficient. Today’s attackers bypass these defences by targeting the user, leveraging credential theft, session hijacking, and other identity-based attacks to gain a foothold. With a staggering number of security breaches originating from compromised credentials, businesses must shift their focus to protecting their digital identities. This is where Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) becomes a strategic necessity.
PrimaryTech’s Managed ITDR service is specifically built to address this evolving threat landscape in Microsoft 365 environments. We continuously monitor identity-based threats and offer a fully managed solution combining enterprise-grade technology with our team of elite identity experts to detect and respond to suspicious activities rapidly. We focus on protecting credentials and session tokens to ensure your organisation’s digital identities remain secure, even against the most sophisticated attacks.
Technical Deep Dive: The Flaws of Legacy Security vs. ITDR’s Proactive Defence
Traditional security measures, such as basic MFA and conditional access policies, are a crucial first line of defence but have significant limitations. Attackers can increasingly bypass these controls using sophisticated techniques like Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) attacks and session hijacking. Once a bad actor has slipped past an SMB’s perimeter defences, their next goal is to establish persistence.
Our Managed ITDR service, by contrast, provides a proactive, human-driven approach to security that goes beyond simple automation.
The ITDR Difference:
- Continuous Identity Protection: Our team of identity experts monitors your Microsoft 365 environment 24/7, identifying and mitigating threats. This constant vigilance is critical because attackers use “dwell time” to explore your environment and gather intel.
- Detection of Unwanted Access: We detect and respond to sophisticated threats, including credential theft, session hijacking, and AiTM attacks, to protect your most critical assets. We also expose unusual login locations and VPN anomalies to ensure only authorised users can access your data.
- Uncovering Rogue Applications and Shadow Workflows: A standard method for maintaining persistence is through malicious OAuth applications. We proactively detect and remediate these rogue apps lurking in your Microsoft 365 environment. Our service also neutralises malicious inbox and forwarding rules often used in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attempts.
- Human-Verified, Actionable Alerts: Our approach is built on the principle that humans are more intelligent than machines. Every alert we send is actionable and human-verified, with a low false positive rate, putting you two steps ahead of attackers.
Strategic Framework: Aligning ITDR with Cyber Essentials Plus
For UK businesses, implementing an ITDR solution is critical to achieving and maintaining robust security frameworks, such as Cyber Essentials Plus. This certification requires organisations to demonstrate that they have strong technical controls.
Access Control (Requirement 3):
ITDR directly addresses the need for secure access control. By continuously monitoring for credential theft, session hijacking, and other identity-based attacks, we help you enforce a strong access control posture. Our service can also detect and flag unauthorised access from unusual locations.
Secure Configuration (Requirement 2):
Our ITDR service helps to enforce secure configurations within Microsoft 365. It proactively detects and remediates malicious OAuth applications and inbox forwarding rules, which are often used to maintain unauthorised access and subvert your security configurations.
Malware Protection (Requirement 4):
ITDR complements traditional malware protection by focusing on the persistent threats that bypass those initial defences. By detecting malicious processes and rogue apps, we eliminate the persistence that allows attackers to gather more intel and ultimately do more damage through ransomware or password theft.
Implementation Best Practices & Common Pitfalls
Deploying a modern ITDR solution requires a strategic approach to configuration and management, moving beyond simple automation.
Best Practices:
- Prioritise a Managed Service: Many businesses’ primary pitfall is relying on automated tools alone to combat persistent threats. Our Managed ITDR service provides the essential human-driven approach, combining technology with trained experts who understand attacker tradecraft to see through the techniques used to deceive automated systems.
- Ensure Rapid Response: We boast a Mean-Time-To-Respond (MTTR) of just 3 minutes, which is crucial for stopping hackers before they can cause damage. Joshua Ross, Founder of JXE Tech, noted that before our service, it could have been "days or even weeks" before a compromised account was known.
- Focus on Actionable Intelligence: Our service provides actionable alerts that are human-verified, helping you block accounts immediately before bad actors can do damage.
Common Pitfalls:
- Ignoring Alert Fatigue: Relying on software-only offerings can lead to alert fatigue, where a sea of alerts with little context diverts focus from the threats that truly matter. Our service is built to cut through the noise and only surface real threats.
- Underestimating Persistence: Many companies underestimate the threat of persistence, which is a tactic that allows attackers to quietly maintain access to a system over time. These attacks are specifically designed to survive system reboots, changed credentials, and even restoring from backups.
- Assuming MFA is a Silver Bullet: While MFA is vital, it can be bypassed through attacks like session hijacking and AiTM. ITDR provides a necessary extra layer of defence to protect against these advanced threats.
Conclusion
Modern businesses operate in a landscape where identity is the new frontier for cyber-attacks. Through our Managed ITDR service, we offer the deep visibility and rapid, human-led response capabilities needed to meet these threats head-on. By partnering with us, UK organisations can leverage enterprise-grade security without the overhead of building an internal SOC. This approach not only provides superior protection against sophisticated threats but also aligns with the stringent requirements of frameworks like Cyber Essentials Plus, establishing a robust and verifiable security posture.
Implementing a robust security posture requires deep technical expertise and a strategic understanding of verifiable frameworks. If your team needs a partner who can architect, implement, and validate these controls to achieve Cyber Essentials Plus, let’s connect.
Published: August 11