Steps to Defend Against Entra ID Identity Threats

steve-shapiro
Steven Shapiro
July 10, 2025
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Steps to Defend Against Entra ID Identity Threats

Entra ID Is a Prime Target for Attacks In hybrid or cloud-only environments, Entra ID vulnerabilities, if unknown or not addressed, open the door to cyber attackers wishing to steal from you or do you harm. Common threats and exploits against Entra ID

Many attack vectors that commonly offer cybercriminals ways into Entra ID – and into the organization’s digital assets – can be anticipated. That makes proactive detection of vulnerabilities possible – those sometimes-hidden design flaws, misconfigurations, and human errors that can lead to attacks. It’s also important to detect attacks that have already begun. Remediation steps follow.

First, some of the common threats that Entra ID environments face are:

  • Token theft and session hijacking

Attackers steal session tokens, using phishing or adversary-in-the-middle, allowing MFA to be bypassed.

Token replay: Attackers intercept tokens using Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) tools, for example, then have access even with MFA in place.

  • Password spraying and account takeover

Successful attacks at large scale might “spray” common passwords across many accounts to avoid lockouts and to avoid detection by monitors looking for multiple failed logins for an account. Breaches lead to account takeover, and all means of data exfiltration and privilege escalation can result.

  • OAuth Application Exploits

Attackers deploy OAuth apps with excessive permissions. That can lead to any combination of data theft, tenant-wide control, and backdoor access. Targets are Entra ID’s integration with cloud services.

  • Compromised Hybrid Identities

Synched service accounts may allow attackers to pivot from on-premises Active Directory to Entra ID. Attackers might use stolen on-premises credentials to escalate to cloud tenants, made easier when admin accounts lack MFA or Privileged Identity Management (PIM).

  • Credential Phishing

A top vector for initial access, credentials are stolen in phishing attacks. Social engineered, carefully worded (and increasingly AI-generated) emails and messages that trick users into entering their credentials on fake login screens or forms. For example: UNK_SneakyStrike has targeted more than 80,000 Entra ID accounts using tools like TeamFiltration.

  • Overprivileged Accounts and Roles

Attacks that exploit misconfigured or overly permissive roles to escalate privileges, they can result in attackers gaining Global Administrator access. They do that by leveraging inherent design flaws in role permissions, service principal configurations, and administrative units.

Proactive detection through monitoring, and strict access controls, and rigorous (and enforced) approval workflows, are needed to prevent these attacks.

  • Lateral movement

These are post-breach tactics that allow attackers to make things worse for the victim by pivoting across systems and reaching high-value assets like domain controllers.

Cross-tenant synchronization abuse: The B2B collaboration feature is used to move laterally between partner tenants, and malicious accounts can be provisioned for persistent access or access escalation.

Intune permission exploitation: Service principals with permissions to alter device management attributes may be compromised to enable lateral movement.

Service Principal Compromise: Lateral movement attacks through hijacked service principals with excessive permissions.

Approaches to defending against attacks

Traditional approaches to security of identity management have limitations. Privileged Identity Management (PIM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions don’t completely protect from exploitation of privileged accounts, service accounts, and legacy credentials those accounts might have. Misconfigurations or gaps in coverage can allow attackers to escalate privileges or activate admin roles that have been dormant but never removed. All these activities may be undetected. And manual e?orts to study audit logs are tedious and error prone.

Better ways to bolster your defenses

So, what can be done to better protect Entra ID from attacks? That is best answered in three phases: 1) Awareness of vulnerabilities; 2) Awareness of in-process identity threats and exploits; and 3) Actions to take to address vulnerabilities and the spread of ongoing attacks.

Indicators of Exposure (IOEs): Before attacks occur, vulnerabilities lurk. To be proactive, security operations teams must find those vulnerabilities and then determine the best way to fix each of them.

A few examples of IOEs:

  • Use of weak passwords or default credentials

  • Unenforced MFA policies

  • Misconfigured permissions

  • Open ports incorrectly exposed to external access

  • Expired SSL certificates

IOEs identify risks – they are proactive, allowing operations teams to fix them before an attack occurs. Penetration tests and configuration auditing are helpful to surface these.

Indicators of Compromise (IOCs): Some liken an IOC to a piece of forensic evidence – it is data that identifies potentially malicious activity. A security breach has perhaps already happened, or an attack is underway.

Examples of IOCs:

  • Unusual network traffic, maybe with malicious IPs, or sudden spikes in abnormal activity.

  • Malicious domain names or URLs.

  • Registry changes or file modifications.

  • Suspicious login attempts.

  • Suspicious process executions.

These are investigative. Obtaining these pieces of evidence allows the security team to detect breaches and more fully understand the scope and nature of an attack. They are utilized by many SIEM systems and threat intelligence platforms to detect threats in logs and on networks.

Actions to take: Best practices for improving your security posture and minimizing effects of infiltrations by bad actors

Remediation of vulnerabilities is a cyclical process requiring both IOEs and IOCs for full knowledge of the extent of the attack surface.

You’ll want to continuously monitor for IOE and IOC events, so appropriate steps can be taken as new evidence of security gaps or malicious behavior are found.

Steps to Entra ID Attack Surface Hardening

How to stop attacks in your environment? There are some time-tested best practices for doing just that. They include monitoring of IOEs and IOCs, auditing, manual investigation, or scans that will help in guiding the design of each of these in your environment for before, during, and after attacks.

1. Implement Least Privilege Models

Assign users the minimum permissions necessary for their roles. Avoid granting excessive privileges, especially for day-to-day tasks. Leverage Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for just-in-time privileged access. And instead of granting broad admin rights to allow specific tasks to be done, delegate only the necessary permissions for those tasks using custom groups.

  • Limit assignments of highly privileged roles.

  • For sensitive resources, use RBAC to systematically restrict access.

Follow MITRE ATT&CK mitigation guidance: T1003, T1134, M1026, M1015, M1018

2. Setup and Enforce Authentication and Access Controls

  • Require MFA for all users, neutralizing threats from stolen passwords being used for Active Directory and Entra ID infiltration. MFA also reduces the risk of lateral movement by attackers. In Entra ID, enable security defaults to automatically enforce MFA and to block legacy authentication.

  • Require robust authentication for every connection. Removing implicit trust will make it much harder for attackers to succeed. And it strengthens defense against insider threats by either enforcing additional authentication, limiting permissions, or denying access completely. And limit guest user permissions.

  • Use IP allowlisting by setting up trusted IP address ranges in the Named Locations, then using Conditional Access policies to refer to Locations marked as “trusted”.

MITRE ATT&CK mitigation guidance: T1621, T1040, M1015, M0915, M1036, M1018

3. Adopt Tiered Administration

  • Assuming cloud-only Entra ID and hybrid environments, you’ll be using Microsoft’s Enterprise Access Model (EAM) instead of legacy tiering used in AD. EAM does still use Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tier 2 separation of administration tasks. They are role and permission limited, and are implemented using Administrative Units, RBAC, and Conditional Access to enforce separation.

  • The EAM model is designed for management of cloud-specific risks like service principal abuse and escalation of application permissions.

MITRE ATT&CK mitigation guidance: T1482, T1136, T1098, M1026, M1030, M1047

4. Harden and Monitor Service Accounts in Entra ID

  • Use system-assigned or user-assigned managed identities for auto-rotated credentials.

  • For service principals, use certificate credentials instead of client secrets. Restrict permissions using RBAC and Administrative Units. Assign only necessary API permissions.

  • Mitigate threats by auditing critical changes to service accounts, alerting on changes to credentials and permissions and suspicious sign-ins (e.g., from unexpected locations).

MITRE ATT&CK mitigation guidance: M1018, M1026, M1032

5. Enforce Patch Management

  • Fully patch Entra ID hybrid components, like Entra Connect, and admin workstations.

  • Patching also proactively updates your defenses as known threats evolve, and new threats appear.

MITRE ATT&CK mitigation guidance: M1051

6. Implement Continuous Monitoring

  • Monitoring can detect suspicious activity and threats quickly. Monitor all changes to users, roles, groups, and policies. This includes tracking who made a change, when, and what was changed. Monitor privileged account activities and authentication attempts to detect suspicious behavior quickly.

  • Set up real-time alerts for critical changes (like role assignments or risky sign-ins) for quick response.

MITRE ATT&CK mitigation guidance: M1056, M1057, M1017

Conclusion

By systematically taking the actions in this post, organizations can significantly reduce the attack surface of Entra ID, improving the overall security posture and resilience against identity-based threats.

Reducing the Entra ID attack surface will not guarantee that all attacks will stop. But doing your due diligence to put in place safeguards under your control will be your best defense against cyberattacks.

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