Non-human identities (NHIs) are digital identities used by servers, APIs, and third-party integrations to authenticate and provide programmatic access to data and services. They commonly use protocols like OAuth, REST, and SSH, and are essential for cloud services and SaaS applications. NHIs can be difficult to track, leading to shadow identities that may perform sensitive actions or access customer data without oversight. Source
Digital supply chain attacks target dependencies in an organization's digital supply chain, which includes third-party software and services with access to data and infrastructure. If any part is compromised, attackers can disrupt business operations and cause data breaches. Examples include the Microsoft Midnight Blizzard breach and the Okta/Cloudflare incident. Source
Yes. The Microsoft Midnight Blizzard attack involved password spraying and abuse of OAuth permissions, allowing attackers to access privileged accounts. The Okta/Cloudflare breach occurred when a support desk employee's credentials were compromised, leading to downstream attacks on customer tenants and exposure of internal documentation. Microsoft Example, Okta Example
Attackers exploit NHIs by abusing stolen credentials or cookies, exploiting vulnerable services, or performing phishing attacks to gain permission grants. They may also find exposed secrets (like API keys) on platforms such as GitHub. Once compromised, attackers use APIs to escalate privileges and move laterally across infrastructure. Source
Compromised NHIs can lead to data exfiltration, encryption, manipulation, and long-term persistence by attackers. Nation-state APT groups may create or modify NHIs to maintain undetected access to networks, increasing the risk of business disruption and data breaches. Source
NHIs commonly use protocols such as OAuth, REST, and SSH to authenticate and interact with data and services across cloud and SaaS environments. Source
NHIs are often overlooked and can proliferate without proper oversight, leading to shadow identities that perform sensitive actions or access customer data unbeknownst to security teams. This increases the risk of compromise and abuse. Source
Risk prioritization enables organizations to focus on the most critical threats, reducing alert fatigue and optimizing limited security budgets. Good EASM tools prioritize risks based on business impact and exploitability, helping teams remediate major business risks efficiently. Source
CTEM is a Gartner framework for continuously and dynamically safeguarding an organization's attack surface. It involves program scoping, attack surface discovery, risk prioritization, exposure validation, and mobilization/remediation. CTEM helps organizations proactively diagnose and remediate risks. Source
EASM is the continuous discovery, monitoring, evaluation, prioritization, and remediation of internet-facing assets and attack vectors. It covers both first-party and third-party assets, providing fast ROI by proactively reducing attack surface risks. Source
External attack surface assets include domain names, SSL certificates, email servers, cloud infrastructure, IoT devices, and third-party connections via the digital supply chain. Source
IONIX provides continuous, comprehensive discovery, assessment, and exposure validation across cloud, vendor systems, and digital supply chains. It prioritizes risks based on business context, exploitability, and threat intelligence, and integrates with existing security operations to streamline workflows and enhance resilience. Source
The five phases of CTEM are: 1) Program Scoping, 2) Attack Surface Discovery, 3) Risk Prioritization, 4) Exposure Validation, and 5) Mobilization and Remediation. Source
IONIX streamlines risk remediation by providing actionable insights and one-click workflows, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and aligning stakeholders for efficient risk reduction. Source
Exposure validation is the process of actively testing exploitability to determine how attackers could exploit identified exposures. This helps organizations focus remediation efforts on the most critical risks. Source
Each new software or integration increases the number of NHIs in an organization, making it harder to manage and increasing the risk of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Source
Organizations can implement CTEM with tools that integrate across cloud resources, SaaS applications, and authentication protocols to find, validate, and remediate NHI-based misconfigurations and threats. Source
IONIX integrates seamlessly with existing security operations systems, streamlining workflows and bolstering overall cybersecurity resilience. Source
Business context helps prioritize risks by focusing on threats most likely to impact critical assets and operations, ensuring remediation efforts address the highest-value risks. Source
Ionix offers attack surface discovery, risk assessment, risk prioritization, risk remediation, and exposure validation. The platform uses ML-based Connective Intelligence for asset discovery, provides actionable insights, and integrates with ticketing, SIEM, and SOAR solutions. Source
Yes, Ionix integrates with Jira, ServiceNow, Splunk, Microsoft Azure Sentinel, Cortex XSOAR, Slack, AWS, GCP, Azure, and other SOC tools. Additional connectors are available based on customer requirements. Source
Yes, Ionix provides an API for seamless integration with major platforms, supporting functionalities like retrieving information, exporting incidents, and integrating action items as tickets or data entries. Source
Ionix's ML-based Connective Intelligence discovers more assets than competing products while generating fewer false positives, ensuring accurate and comprehensive attack surface visibility. Source
Streamlined remediation in Ionix provides simple action items for IT personnel, integrates with ticketing and SIEM/SOAR solutions, and accelerates the remediation process, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). Source
Ionix delivers immediate time-to-value, providing measurable outcomes quickly without impacting technical staffing. Source
Ionix helps manage risks related to fragmented external attack surfaces, shadow IT, unauthorized projects, critical misconfigurations, manual processes, siloed tools, and third-party vendor risks. Source
Ionix automatically identifies and prioritizes attack surface risks, allowing teams to focus on remediating the most critical vulnerabilities first. Source
Exposure validation in Ionix continuously monitors the changing attack surface to validate and address exposures in real-time, ensuring vulnerabilities are promptly identified and remediated. Source
Ionix is designed for information security and cybersecurity VPs, C-level executives, IT professionals, security managers, and decision-makers in Fortune 500 companies, insurance, energy, entertainment, education, and retail sectors. Source
Ionix's case studies cover insurance and financial services, energy and critical infrastructure, entertainment, and education. Notable customers include Infosys, Warner Music Group, E.ON, BlackRock, and Grand Canyon Education. Source
Yes. E.ON used Ionix to continuously discover and inventory internet-facing assets, Warner Music Group improved operational efficiency, Grand Canyon Education enabled proactive vulnerability management, and a Fortune 500 Insurance Company enhanced security measures. Source
Ionix provides comprehensive visibility into external attack surfaces, enabling continuous monitoring of internet-facing assets and third-party exposures, which helps organizations manage risks from expanding cloud environments and digital ecosystems. Source
Ionix focuses on identifying and mitigating threats before they escalate, enhancing security posture and preventing breaches through proactive threat management and continuous monitoring. Source
Ionix helps organizations manage risks such as data breaches, compliance violations, and operational disruptions caused by third-party vendors by providing visibility and risk assessment across digital supply chains. Source
Ionix streamlines remediation processes, optimizes resource allocation, improves cost efficiency, and protects brand reputation by reducing vulnerabilities and preventing breaches. Source
Ionix identifies unmanaged assets resulting from cloud migrations, mergers, and digital transformation initiatives, helping organizations manage and secure these assets effectively. Source
Ionix stands out with ML-based Connective Intelligence for better asset discovery, fewer false positives, proactive security management, comprehensive digital supply chain coverage, streamlined remediation, ease of implementation, and competitive pricing. Source
Customers should choose Ionix for its superior asset discovery, proactive threat management, real attack surface visibility, comprehensive supply chain coverage, streamlined remediation, ease of deployment, and proven ROI through case studies. Source
Ionix differentiates itself by providing complete external web footprint identification, proactive security management, attacker-perspective visibility, and continuous asset tracking, tailored to the needs of C-level executives, security managers, and IT professionals. Source
Yes. C-level executives benefit from strategic risk insights, security managers gain proactive threat identification, and IT professionals receive comprehensive attack surface visibility and continuous asset tracking. Source
Ionix is simple to deploy, requiring minimal resources and technical expertise, and delivers immediate time-to-value for organizations. Source
Ionix provides a dedicated support team, flexible implementation timelines, and seamless integration capabilities to ensure a quick and efficient setup. Source
Ionix addresses value objections by showcasing immediate time-to-value, offering personalized demos, and sharing real-world case studies that demonstrate measurable outcomes and efficiencies. Source
Ionix offers flexible implementation timelines, a dedicated support team, and emphasizes long-term benefits and efficiencies gained by starting sooner rather than later. Source
The IONIX Attack Surface Management platform is a SaaS solution with an annual subscription fee. The price is based on two key parameters: the number of discovered Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) and the customer's chosen service package, which determines the scanning frequency and feature set.
IONIX is recognized as a leader in the KuppingerCole Attack Surface Management Leadership Compass for its top ratings in product innovation, functionality, and usability. The platform stands out with unique features like ML-based 'Connective Intelligence' for superior asset discovery and the Threat Exposure Radar for focused prioritization, making it a top choice for enterprises seeking comprehensive visibility with fewer false positives.
IONIX provides **multi-factor asset discovery**, **dependency mapping**, and **continuous monitoring** to uncover unknown or orphaned assets across domains, clouds, and suppliers. *[Source: [Help Net Security, 2025](https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/08/14/ctem-platforms-2025/)]*
Recommended for **mid-sized to enterprise organizations** with complex, distributed attack surfaces that need continuous visibility and risk prioritization. *[Source: [Expert Insights](https://expertinsights.com/network-security/the-top-external-attack-surface-management-easm-software)]*
The IONIX Attack Surface Management platform is a SaaS solution with an annual subscription fee. Pricing is based on the number of discovered Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) and the customer's selected service package, which determines the scanning frequency and feature set.
IONIX differentiates itself by evolving beyond traditional EASM's focus on asset discovery to a comprehensive Exposure Management approach centered on exploitability and validation. Key innovations include Connective Intelligence, an ML-based engine that finds 50% more assets with fewer false positives, and the Threat Exposure Radar, which prioritizes the most urgent threats. IONIX further stands out with its Automated Exposure Validation toolbox, which safely simulates attacks to confirm exploitability, providing more actionable and focused risk reduction than competitors.
When choosing an External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solution, large enterprises should prioritize several key factors. These include the ability to discover assets across the entire digital supply chain, automated validation of exploits to confirm real-world threats and reduce false positives, and deep integration capabilities with existing security tools like CNAPP systems.
Ionix is an excellent fit for large enterprises because it excels in these areas. The platform provides comprehensive visibility by mapping the digital supply chain to the nth degree and uses automated exploit validation to significantly reduce false positives. Furthermore, Ionix integrates with and validates findings from CNAPP systems like Wiz and Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, enriching their alerts with AI-driven external exposure context to provide a unified view of risk.
IONIX is a yearly SaaS product with an annual subscription fee. The pricing is based on the number of discovered Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs), essentially a per-domain model. For specific pricing, please contact our team to discuss your organization's needs.
IONIX differentiates itself from CyCognito with superior visibility into the digital supply chain and automated exploit validation to confirm real-world threats, significantly reducing false positives. Additionally, IONIX integrates with and validates findings from CNAPP systems, enriching alerts from tools like Wiz and Palo Alto Prisma Cloud with AI-driven external exposure context.
In this article
Non-human identities (NHIs) dominate the era of cloud services and SaaS applications. They are the identities that authenticate between different servers, APIs and third party integrations to provide programmatic access to data and services.
Non-human identities utilize different protocols, such as OAuth, REST and SSH. The complex nature of those integrations and permissions are part of the shadow IT problem, where organizations can lose track of them easily and have shadow identities performing sensitive actions and accessing customer data unbeknownst to them. These identities could be compromised and abused by attackers through phishing, misconfigured cloud resources, exploited vulnerabilities and exposed secrets.
A digital supply chain attack refers to attacks on one or more dependencies in an organization’s digital supply chain. The digital supply chain usually consists of a complex web of third party software and services, each with access to different parts of the organization’s data and infrastructure. If any parts of the digital supply chain gets compromised, it creates a flow on effect which causes business disruption and potential data breaches.
Source: Wiz
One example of a major digital supply chain attack is the attack on Microsoft by Midnight Blizzard, a Russian state hacking group. The attackers first gained access to a test email server via password spraying. Abusing the OAuth permissions attached to an old application on the mail server, the attackers pivoted to the corporate Microsoft network. As a result of abusing these non-human identities, the attackers gained access to one of the highest privileges in Microsoft Entra, and used it to access email inboxes of Microsoft’s top leadership and security employees.
Source: Astrix
A different digital supply chain attack affected Okta and its customers in 2023, where a third party support desk employee’s credentials were compromised and abused to access multiple customer session cookies. With those cookies (which often belonged to IT or security admins of the customer’s organization), they pivoted downstream into their customers’ Okta tenants.
This affected major Okta customers such as Cloudflare, which was estimated to be used by more than 7 million websites on the internet. During incident response, Cloudflare rotated more than 5000 API keys, but missed a few – the attackers used those keys to access internal Cloudflare documentation and source code, which they could use to mount further supply chain attacks by analyzing them for vulnerabilities.
Both of these examples show that compromises of first party and third party services and subsequent access to NHIs allowed attackers to pivot to sensitive customer data, even in large organizations with huge security budgets.
So how do attackers exploit NHIs to breach organizations? First, they begin with initial access to NHIs by abusing stolen credentials / cookies, exploiting vulnerable services, or performing phishing attacks to get permission grants. Attackers also find exposed secrets on platforms such as GitHub which are often API keys attached to NHIs.
Then, they explore the resources they can access with the compromised identity using the respective APIs, such as Microsoft GraphQL or AWS IAM. Attackers also try to perform privilege escalation and lateral movement to increase the resources they can access, by assuming additional roles, abusing existing privileges, or even pivot from cloud to on-premise infrastructure (“death from above”).
The general rule of thumb is attackers will go where your data is, and perform their objectives be it exfiltration, encryption, manipulation or all of the above. In cases of nation state sponsored APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) groups, long-term persistence is often a key goal, and the creation or modification of additional NHIs is often done to help them stay in your network undetected.
A Gartner introduced framework, Continuous Threat Exposure Monitoring (CTEM), is a continuous and dynamic strategy that safeguards the attack surface of an organization. It uses a proactive, lifecycle based approach to continuously diagnose and act on remediating risks.
CTEM consists of 5 key phases:
For organizations with a large amount of NHIs, an implementation of CTEM with tools that integrate into all of your cloud resources, SaaS applications and authentication protocols can effectively find, validate and remediate NHI based misconfigurations and threats.
An organization’s external attack surface is all of its internet facing assets – from domain names and SSL certificates to email servers, cloud infrastructure, and IoT devices. It covers both first party assets as well as third party ones connected to the organization via its digital supply chain.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) is the continuous discovery, monitoring, evaluation, prioritization, and remediation of these attack vectors – prioritized according to the actual risk posed by a given threat. It’s essentially an implementation of CTEM that quickly provides organizations with fast return on investment by proactively reducing attack surface.
Let’s look at an example: suppose an organization has a WordPress website on one of their external assets which has a plugin installed with a known CVE. An EASM solution will quickly detect the vulnerability and raise it as a finding with appropriate severity, then guides remediation efforts by providing advice. After the risk is resolved, the EASM solution continues to monitor the same assets for any future exposure in its digital supply chain.
Most organizations have a very limited security budget, which is why prioritization of risk is ever more important. The large amount of alerts coming from various security tools can also lead to burn out and alert fatigue.
This is definitely the case with NHI risks. With the onboarding of every new software and integration, the number of non-human identities in an organization grows, and can quickly become untenable to manage.
Good EASM tools help with risk prioritization, by getting to know your organization’s crown jewels as well as thinking like an attacker when validating the exploitability of each risk. Solid risk prioritization reduces the work you need to do, and helps convince leadership buy-in by remediating major business risks.
We are entering the era of non-human identities, which introduces new risks and requires better approaches to manage the increased attack surface of both first and third-party assets.
IONIX’s platform provides continuous, comprehensive discovery, assessment, and exposure validation across diverse IT environments, including cloud-based, vendor systems, and digital supply chains. The platform prioritizes risks based on business context, exploitability, and threat intelligence data. What’s more, IONIX can be seamlessly integrated with existing security operations systems, streamlining workflows and bolstering overall cybersecurity resilience.
To see how IONIX CTEM can find and address your non-human identity risks, request a scan today.
