Identity Is the New Perimeter: Attackers Skip Exploits, Log In With Stolen Creds

Credential theft, session hijacking, and MFA fatigue have quietly overtaken traditional exploitation as the dominant intrusion path. Attackers don’t need a CVE when an infostealer log, a phished OAuth token, or a bypassed push prompt hands them a valid session — one that sails past EDR, WAFs, and patch cycles because nothing is technically broken. The authenticated user is doing exactly what the system was designed to permit.

The structural problem is that identity sprawl outpaces identity governance. Every SaaS tenant, CI/CD runner, and service account is a potential foothold, and most organizations still treat IAM as a provisioning problem rather than a detection surface. Stale tokens, over-scoped OAuth grants, and shared admin accounts create a shadow attack graph that vulnerability scanners never see.

Defense shifts from patching binaries to patching trust relationships: phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2, passkeys), short-lived tokens, continuous session validation, and behavioral analytics tuned to detect impossible-travel and anomalous API call patterns. Until identity telemetry gets the same investment as endpoint telemetry, the front door stays propped open.