The Identity Attack Surface: A Practical Security Checklist

Audit configuration drift, manage non-human identities, and close hidden lateral movement paths.

Identity and access permissions are the highways connecting every corner of a hybrid environment. Because traditional vulnerability scanners look only at CVEs, they remain blind to how threat actors combine issues such as excessive permissions, cached tokens, and misconfigured service accounts to compromise critical assets.

This practical technical checklist provides 20 best practices for security architects and IAM teams to assess identity security posture across hybrid environments.

Key Areas Audited in the Checklist:

• Non-Human Identity Posture: Tracking privilege levels for machine and AI accounts.
• Credential Hygiene: Locating cached, shared, and exposed domain credentials.
• Least Privilege Enforcement: Verifying if elevated Active Directory and cloud permissions are actually in use.
• Configuration Drift Control: Detecting unauthorized permission changes over time.