Clarifying Identity Risk
When Microsoft introduced Edge for Business as a secure enterprise browser last year, it upended our impressions of the mundane, run-of-the-mill “client internet browser.” As a true enterprise-class tool, Edge for Business got good reviews right off the bat for its enterprise approach to browsing:
- 97% of Gartner Peer Insights user reviews were from enterprise users providing four- and five-star ratings.
- These users called it out for "integrating smoothly with Microsoft 365 tools," "support and seamless integration for both Linux and Mac," and "managing multiple profiles at once," among other new capabilities.
The latest updates of Edge for Business raise these stakes even higher, especially for CISOs and security teams, with new connectors that remove some of the gaps between enterprise knowledge workers and cybersecurity teams.
Edge for Business Launches New Connectors
One of the best things about Edge for Business is (at the risk of being obvious) its clear, enterprise-first approach to the security concerns of web browsing. A study from Palo Alto Networks last year showed that knowledge workers spend “90% of their workday in the web browser.” This is oddly unsurprising and alarming all at once, and the number is real. It’s supported by a recent InfoSecurity Magazine article showing how cybercriminals are “increasingly focusing on browsers as their primary attack vector, leveraging sophisticated evasion techniques, social engineering and zero-day vulnerabilities to bypass traditional security measures.”
If the browser is the latest battlefield between adversaries and end users, Edge for Business integrations promise to move our computing power and defenses closer to the front lines. But what does that look like?
It starts with a series of off-the-shelf connectors that tie browser data and telemetry directly to best-of-breed security tools from the XDR, IGA, and IdRM categories.
The new integration with Axiad Mesh is an excellent example.
Axiad Mesh: Proud to Be One of the First Integrations in Edge for Business
Axiad Mesh is Axiad’s home-grown identity risk management solution, or IdRM. Axiad Mesh addresses the dramatically increasing identity threats facing every organization today: compromised credentials, incomplete or misconfigured MFA deployments, shadow IT creation of unmonitored (but often privileged) accounts, unknown blast radius from compromised identities, and unknown identity accounts. It helps cybersecurity teams to:
- Identify an organization's identity risks across their teams and business units, whether in on-prem infrastructure or in the cloud, and if the latter, whether IaaS or SaaS.
- Quantify: For those continually discovered risks, Axiad Mesh helps cybersecurity teams quantify the risk. What’s the impact on projects? What’s the overall blast radius if compromised? What other identities might be sequentially compromised?
- Fortify: Once these risks are identified and quantified, they need to be addressed and managed. Axiad Mesh helps fortify identities against discovered risks through built-in guidance, automation, and AI-generated troubleshooting.
Like all threat detection / risk identification tools, Axiad Mesh relies on many specialized connectors to furnish it with the signal data in which these risks so often hide. Some of this data comes from HR management systems like TriNet or Workday, some from IGA solutions like SailPoint or Saviynt, some from machine identity solutions like Venafi, AppviewX or Cyberark.
The Axiad Mesh + Edge for Business connector and integrations have the ability to process identity-based risk telemetry captured in real-time from enterprise browsers, opening a whole new world for identity risks to be Identified and Quantified and for the identities to be Fortified.
The first use cases of this integration include:
- Identifying account passwords being created or changed as a session starts, just like the typical first actions of living-off-the-land attackers
- Highlighting instances where a newly created identity transfers sensitive data
- Flagging unknown logins, possibly a source of Shadow IT logging into sites or SaaS offerings
- Providing “compromised account” alerts (in real-time) based on new Dark Web data
- Identifying potentially dangerous downloads that try to immediately modify identity parameters or permissions
- Tagging questionable identities that have downloaded malware for immediate analysis
This short list of integration features demonstrates the value of an intriguing marriage: ubiquitous enterprise browsing platform + best-of-breed identity risk management = identity protection at enterprise scale.
More to Come
Microsoft Edge for Business connectors and integrations are launching at the RSA Conference in April. If you’re a current or future user of either Edge for Business or Axiad Mesh and have input to help the teams prioritize and define the features and use cases above, give us call or send us a message.
In the meantime, look for news on the continuing and deepening integrations. They promise to tip the scales in the battlefield lying between cybersecurity teams, determined adversaries, and internet-browsing end users and their identities.