Rubrik launches Identity Resilience for stronger cyber defence
Rubrik has introduced a new solution called Identity Resilience, aiming to bolster security for identity systems often targeted in cyber-attacks against critical infrastructure.
The company's latest offering addresses a notable gap in enterprise security by focusing on the authentication infrastructure underpinning both human and non-human identities (NHIs). Rubrik intends for Identity Resilience to provide continuous monitoring of identity changes, with the aim of detecting suspicious activity earlier and helping to reduce the risk of privilege escalation and lateral movement within corporate networks.
A report from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently identified that 90 per cent of cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure begin with an identity compromise. Typically, attackers use these vulnerabilities to escalate privileges and move laterally to access sensitive company data.
These attacks often develop over a period of time, making it important for organisations to track not only "who" and "what" but also "when" access and privilege patterns shift.
"Identity systems are not only complex and hard to manage, but they have also become the primary gateway for attackers aiming to access an organisation's valuable data," said Mike Tornincasa, Chief Business Officer at Rubrik. "Today, we signal our commitment to identity protection, to address our customers' needs by detecting threats that target identities and proactively reduce identity risks, just as we have successfully done with data security."
According to Rubrik, when identity systems are compromised, attackers may obtain broad access to critical data and essential credentials, impeding the organisation's ability to recover from cyber incidents. Rubrik's Identity Resilience solution is intended to safeguard this function and maintain operational continuity for affected organisations.
The company reports that its identity protection business now safeguards millions of identities worldwide, including both humans and machines. Non-human identities—which comprise service accounts, access tokens, and similar machine-based authentications—are an increasingly prominent target for threat actors due to their proliferation and the complexity of managing them. Rubrik claims that existing tools do not sufficiently assess NHI risks, view data access, or track suspicious activity associated with these identities over time.
Rubrik describes Identity Resilience as enabling a holistic approach by integrating identity management, protection, and data security capabilities. The aim is to dissolve existing silos between these disciplines that often exist due to disparate teams and products within an organisation. By combining these aspects, Rubrik says it will provide a more comprehensive insight into risks and support a coordinated defence and remediation strategy.
The solution includes features targeting both on-premises and cloud environments, such as Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID. Automated and orchestrated recovery workflows are designed to restore complex hybrid identity environments efficiently, reducing what could otherwise be up to 22 manual steps to a simpler, wizard-based process. Rubrik notes that these recovery tools are among the fastest growing capabilities in its portfolio, now protecting millions of identities and associated sensitive data.
Identity Resilience includes a unified risk analysis view across identity providers to track which human and non-human identities have access to sensitive information. The platform allows organisations to identify dormant or orphaned accounts, detect risky privilege escalations, and uncover problematic access combinations that may not be visible to traditional point solutions. Organisations can also take targeted remediation steps by revoking identity access, data access, or both, which Rubrik explains can help reduce the attack surface and proactively prevent identity-based threats.
Additional capabilities are designed to deliver identity and data context, connecting identity-based data with information about the data itself—such as its type, sensitivity, privilege, and activity. Rubrik believes that this contextually driven approach can decrease remediation efforts and improve an organisation's risk posture prior to an attack, while also enabling more efficient threat hunting and resolution in the event of a breach.
"Today, we signal our commitment to identity protection, to address our customers' needs by detecting threats that target identities and proactively reduce identity risks, just as we have successfully done with data security," Tornincasa reiterated.
Identity Resilience is positioned to provide unified protection for identities and data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms, supporting organisations aiming to reinforce their resilience against the fastest-growing vectors of cyber-attacks.
