Data breaches involving identity security are at an all-time high, with breaches involving customer data getting the most public attention. But with an estimate of over a billion dormant accounts full of sensitive security data scattered across the digital landscape, is it really any wonder customer data is so easily accessible to hackers?
All the same, the explosion of AI into the cybersecurity sphere gives many of us pause, despite the possibility it might be able to help. Many companies have already discovered that AI’s ability to reduce risk and improve security, to boost cyber-resilience in the event of an attack and to simplify regulatory compliance and access security makes it a powerful tool.
The key to building customer trust while balancing the operational efficiency and potential security enhancements offered by AI is blending it with just the right techniques to ensure both that cybersecurity regulatory compliance is upheld, and that customer data sitting in dormant accounts doesn’t present an easy target to attackers.
What AI Brings to the Cybersecurity Table
Security
AI has been doing its part to mitigate access problems, minimize human error and tackle identity-centered cyberattacks. It can be configured to work alongside human operators to identify unusual behavior that might signal a data exfiltration event. Machine-learning algorithms can combine the output of multiple decision trees to analyze such factors as mouse movement, keystroke dynamics, login time and commands.
Efficiency
Efficiency is an important aspect of the cybersecurity game, and AI can boost an organization’s productivity to unrecognizable speeds if utilized correctly. It can optimize team role policies and access requests with role mining, analyze large volumes of data during the authorization process to detect identity threats, flag behavioral anomalies that might indicate malicious activity and even jump-start the process toward containing or eliminating the risk. Any of these examples could take hours, weeks or longer when done manually. AI can feasibly cut response times down to seconds.
How AI Can Support Customer Data Protection
Pairing customer identity and access management (CIAM) tools with identity governance and administration (IGA) tools, both of which tend to heavily utilize AI automations, is the best way to protect customer data.
CIAM ensures the enforcement of password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies, detects risky authentication patterns and control sessions and creates a more secure cloud directory for customer identity data – separated from the company’s internal customer database.
IGA tools are typically already utilized in most organizations, as they patrol the digital landscape to reduce the attack surface through meticulous records of who has access to what within the workforce. An IGA solution can detect inactive accounts and remove personally identifying information and other sensitive attributes, eventually deleting them entirely.
It’s important to note that self-registered customers are seldom conventionally off-boarded, making it challenging for an IGA tool to automatically respond to lifecycle changes in customer accounts.
This is why pairing IGA with CIAM is so important: by collecting signals of activity from the CIAM solution, such as login and app usage behavior, the IGA tool can automatically detect inactive accounts and take appropriate action to not only remove unneeded access, but to also remove sensitive data from the accounts and even change passwords and flag them to require the outdated user to reset the password if ever they begin using the account again.
While actions like this wouldn’t completely remove any risk from unused accounts, it can potentially reduce the impact of a future breach.
Conclusion
Achieving regulatory harmony and customer confidence is the goal. By adopting unconventional strategies and leveraging existing technologies like AI, companies become vigilant guardians of customer data, reducing their exposure to breaches and demonstrating their unwavering commitment to customer security.
