For years, cybersecurity leaders have focused on protecting endpoints, networks, applications, and data. Those investments remain critical. But the way attacks actually work has changed, and attackers have found a far more efficient path into enterprise environments.

Attackers are no longer breaking in. They’re logging in.

Phishing, credential theft, MFA fatigue attacks… attackers have figured out that the front door is easier than the window. Why exploit a vulnerability when you can just log in?

As a result, identity has become one of the most important battlegrounds in cybersecurity. Yet many organizations continue to focus their resilience strategies on data recovery while overlooking the systems that control access to that data. At WEI, we鈥檙e increasingly having conversations around a concept that wasn鈥檛 part of most cybersecurity discussions just a few years ago: identity resilience. It鈥檚 a topic we explored recently on the with Patrick Haverty and Parker Gaines from Rubrik, and the conversation reinforced just how wide the gap remains between where most organizations think they are and where they actually need to be.

Identity resilience may be one of the most important cybersecurity discussions happening today, yet many organizations have not addressed it directly. The data supports that concern. Investigations Report found that credential abuse was responsible for 22 percent of breaches analyzed, underscoring how often attackers gain entry through trusted identities rather than technical exploits.

Security leaders should ask a fundamental question: if an attacker compromises identity infrastructure, can the organization quickly recover? More importantly, can it recover with confidence?

The Stryker Lesson

A more recent example comes from the March 2026 cyberattack against medical technology giant Stryker. found that attackers gained administrative control over identity and device management systems and used that access to remotely wipe corporate endpoints across the organization, with no traditional ransomware involved.

The incident demonstrated a reality many organizations are only beginning to appreciate: attackers don’t need malware to create disruption. Control over the identity infrastructure is enough. And recovery gets especially hard when the systems you’d use to fix the problem are the same ones that got hijacked.

For security leaders, the lesson extends beyond healthcare. The same exposure exists whether the environment runs on Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or a mix of identity platforms. Prevention alone doesn’t solve it. What matters is how quickly the organization can recover once trust in that infrastructure is gone.

What We’re Seeing in the Field

WEI is seeing a growing disconnect between identity protection and identity recovery. Most organizations have done the work. MFA, PAM, Zero Trust, conditional access. Those investments matter. But every one of them is built around keeping attackers out. None of them answer the harder question: what happens when someone is already in?

The MGM breach in 2023 is a good example. Scattered Spider didn’t exploit a technical vulnerability. They called the help desk, impersonated an employee, got an MFA reset, and walked straight through the front door. Then they went after the identity layer itself. Whether that’s Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or a combination of identity providers, compromising the systems that control authentication gives attackers a powerful path to disrupt business operations. The damage ran north of $100 million.

When we ask organizations how they would recover from a compromised identity platform, the conversation often becomes much less certain.

Today鈥檚 identity environments span Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, SaaS applications, cloud services, and hundreds of interconnected business systems. As those systems get more tightly woven together, a disruption in one identity provider ripples across the whole organization fast. Many have tested their backups. Far fewer have tested the recovery of the systems responsible for authenticating users, enforcing access policies, and establishing trust across the enterprise.

Most have invested heavily in protecting identities. Far fewer have a clear answer for what happens when those protections fail.

The New Reality: Attackers Target Trust

Recent high-profile attacks continue to demonstrate a common pattern. Attackers compromise a user account through phishing, credential theft, social engineering, or password reuse. Once inside, they escalate privileges, establish persistence, and begin targeting identity infrastructure.

Accessing data is often only part of the objective. What attackers really want is control over the environment itself. Who gets in, who gets locked out, and who decides. They get there by manipulating administrative accounts, group policies, identity providers, or access controls. Restoring that control is a harder problem than most recovery plans account for.

Why Traditional Recovery Strategies Fall Short

When identity infrastructure is compromised, organizations often face two difficult options.

The first is restoring from backup. Determining whether a backup represents a truly clean recovery point is where things become difficult. If an attacker maintains persistence in the environment before discovery, organizations risk restoring malicious changes alongside legitimate configurations.

The second option is rebuilding identity infrastructure from scratch. Whether the environment is centered on Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or a hybrid identity architecture, recovery can quickly become a complex and time-sensitive exercise. Rebuilding forests, domain controllers, trusts, policies, permissions, and integrations can become a lengthy and error-prone process that places significant operational pressure on IT teams.

Neither option inspires confidence, and confidence is exactly what organizations need during a cyber crisis.

Most recovery strategies were built around attackers exploiting systems rather than authenticating into them. When a trusted identity becomes the vector, you need more than backup plans. You need to be able to rebuild confidence in the environment itself. It鈥檚 a problem Rubrik has spent considerable time solving, and it鈥檚 what drew us to partner with them on this.

How Rubrik Addresses the Identity Recovery Gap

Some of what Rubrik鈥檚 incident response team has documented stopped me cold. When companies try to rebuild Active Directory from scratch after an attack, the process fails roughly 80 percent of the time. The manual runbook runs about 150 pages. One step out of sequence and you go back to the beginning. And the people who know that process well enough to execute it when you are under real pressure? In most organizations, that鈥檚 one or two people. If they鈥檙e traveling, or on vacation, you have a serious problem on top of an already serious problem.

The 鈥渓ast known good鈥� problem also came up in our conversation, and it鈥檚 worth dwelling on. Restoring from backup sounds straightforward until you realize you can鈥檛 always be certain the backup itself is clean. If an attacker had been sitting in the environment for weeks before discovery, you risk pulling their persistence right back in. Rubrik identifies clean recovery points automatically and won鈥檛 let you restore to a state that contains ransomware or anomalous activity. During an incident, that takes one very difficult question completely off the table.

At WEI, we talk a lot about being 鈥渓eft of bang鈥� versus 鈥渞ight of bang鈥� 鈥� preparing before an attack versus responding after one. Rubrik is genuinely built for both. Their posture monitoring identifies misconfigurations and overprovisioned privileges before anyone exploits them. The recovery side handles what comes next if prevention fails. What I keep coming back to is that they treat identity the same way mature security programs treat data: not just something to protect, but something you actually have to be able to recover. That鈥檚 a different standard than most of what I see in the market.

Are You Prepared to Recover Trust?

Most security leaders can identify their RTO for data recovery, although fewer know how long it would take to restore a compromised Active Directory, Entra ID, or Okta environment, or whether they’d even know what a clean recovery point looks like.

That鈥檚 the gap worth closing. No prevention strategy is perfect, and the organizations that weather attacks best are the ones who鈥檝e already thought through what comes next.

MFA matters. Backups matter. But neither tells you what to do when authentication infrastructure itself is what鈥檚 been compromised. If your identity infrastructure went down tomorrow, would you know what to do? If the answer isn’t an immediate yes, that’s worth a conversation before it becomes a crisis.

Next Steps: A few years ago, identity recovery wasn鈥檛 on most security roadmaps. That鈥檚 changed fast. It is now a core component of cyber resilience, operational continuity, and business risk management.

WEI helps organizations evaluate identity risks, validate recovery strategies, and identify gaps that traditional security and disaster recovery assessments often miss. Whether you鈥檙e assessing Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, or Okta dependencies, modernizing identity architecture, or evaluating your ability to recover from an identity-based attack, our team can help you develop a practical path forward. If you鈥檇 like to see Rubrik鈥檚 identity recovery in action before making any decisions, we can also arrange access to their hosted lab environment where you can run real recovery scenarios without touching your production systems.

If you’re not completely confident in the answer, now is the time to find out, not during a cyber incident.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is identity resilience in cybersecurity?

Identity resilience refers to an organization’s ability to recover its identity infrastructure, including Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, and access management systems, after a cyberattack or outage. It goes beyond identity protection to address what happens when prevention fails.

How do organizations recover Active Directory after a ransomware attack?

Recovery typically involves restoring from a known clean backup or rebuilding from scratch, and the same challenge applies to Entra ID and Okta environments. Both options are complex. The bigger challenge is confirming the backup itself is free of attacker persistence before restoring it.

What did the 2026 Stryker attack reveal about identity resilience?

The Stryker attack gave attackers administrative control over the company鈥檚 identity and device management systems, which they used to remotely wipe devices across the organization. No ransomware was involved, since control over identity alone was enough to cause the damage.

What is the difference between identity security and identity resilience?

Identity security focuses on preventing unauthorized access through tools like MFA, Zero Trust, and privileged access management. Identity resilience focuses on recovering trust and access after those protections have been breached.

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For enterprise organizations, identity is the foundation on which every application, every workflow, and every user interaction depends; it extends beyond IT. When your identity infrastructure fails, whether from a cyberattack, misconfiguration, or corruption, your business stops with prolonged downtime. That reality makes investing in modern identity management solutions a strategic imperative for protecting operations and maintaining user trust.

Shifting Toward Identity Management 疯情AV 

According to IBM’s , cyberattacks targeting identity services surged 71% year-over-year between 2022 and 2023. A separate report from XM Cyber found that 80% of cyber attack exposures in 2023 were linked to Active Directory (AD). And according to IDC, 71% of identity-related attacks leveraged stolen or compromised credentials. These figures underscore why organizations are turning to modern identity management solutions to close the gaps left by traditional security tools.

Rather than exploiting software vulnerabilities, today’s adversaries are logging in with legitimate credentials, bypassing traditional endpoint detection tools entirely. Once inside, they escalate privileges, move laterally, and hold your identity systems hostage. If your organization operates with both on-premises AD and cloud-based Entra ID, any change to a single AD object replicates globally, making clean restoration exponentially  more difficult.

Compounding this risk is the fragmentation problem. Most organizations rely on multiple point solutions to defend and recover identity systems, creating dangerous gaps in cross-domain context. When an incident occurs, your teams are left piecing together disjointed alerts during a high-pressure crisis, and every minute of delay extends your exposure and increases the likelihood of attacker persistence across platforms.

What Modern Identity Recovery Looks Like 

Effective identity recovery means more than restoring from a backup; it means recovering to a trusted, known-good state across your entire hybrid identity environment, including AD forests, domain controllers, Entra ID objects, enterprise applications, app registrations, and conditional access policies.

Traditional identity recovery methods are slow, carrying the risk of reintroducing malware, particularly when relying on mutable audit logs or backups that assume a functioning production environment already exists. If Entra ID is restored before AD, for example, hybrid objects may become disassociated, potentially requiring a full Entra Connect sync which can take days in large environments.

The right identity recovery for your organization must address these interdependencies directly. Recovery must be orchestrated, not improvised, with a platform capable of managing full forest recovery through a guided workflow, restoring object-level attributes with their relationships intact, and supporting recovery to alternate environments, including virtual machines, bare metal, and cloud instances.

How Rubrik Identity Recovery Addresses the Hybrid Identity Challenge 

Rubrik鈥檚 identity recovery is purpose-built for this problem. As part of Rubrik Security Cloud, it delivers unified identity management solutions for both Active Directory and Entra ID from a single interface. Built on single-user interface and a Zero Trust model with immutable, air-gapped, access-controlled backups, it ensures your recovery points remain untampered even when your production environment is compromised.

Rubrik automatically discovers domains, domain controllers, and forest hierarchies, identifying FSMO roles and services like DHCP and DNS. Object-level search and restoration enable granular recovery without sacrificing speed. Organizations can also compare AD object attributes between a point-in-time snapshot and the current live state, making it straightforward to identify and roll back malicious changes before they spread further.

The broader Identity Resilience offering, which includes Rubrik identity recovery capabilities, further extends protection with near-real-time monitoring independent of Windows event logs, policy-driven risk detection mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and OWASP, in-app remediation, and the ability to roll forward legitimate identity changes after restoring to a clean baseline. This means your teams remove attacker persistence without losing months of sanctioned identity updates.

Final Thoughts

The cost of inadequate identity recovery is measured in days of downtime and reputational damage. As an AI infrastructure partner with deep expertise in enterprise security architecture, WEI brings AI infrastructure expertise to enterprises, helping organizations evaluate and deploy solutions like Rubrik with precision. Contact WEI today to build a more resilient identity management solutions infrastructure.

Next Steps: WEI鈥檚 cyber assessments provide the insights needed to strengthen your defenses, optimize security investments, and ensure compliance. Whether you need to identify vulnerabilities, test your incident response capabilities, or develop a long-term security strategy, our team is here to help.

聽featuring WEI cybersecurity assessments.

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In today鈥檚 world of聽cyber threats, organizations are prioritizing聽zero trust security聽to safeguard their digital assets.聽, the founding father of Zero Trust, explains in a recent conversation with WEI, 鈥淭rust is a human emotion and has no business in digital systems.鈥� This strategy assumes no user or system is inherently trustworthy, emphasizing the need for continuous validation and strong access controls.

A clear approach provides a roadmap for implementing a secure framework to protect an organization鈥檚 assets. Let鈥檚 outline actionable steps to implement zero trust security in your organization while incorporating best practices to minimize risks.

Why Zero-Day Malware Prevention Is Essential

Watch: Demystifying Zero Trust With John Kindervag

Why Zero Trust Matters

We hear news about聽data breaches聽almost every day, showing how traditional security models relying on perimeter defenses are not enough. These outdated methods fail to keep up with sophisticated threats, leaving your critical assets vulnerable.

Zero trust security operates on a fundamental principle 鈥淣ever trust, always verify.鈥� Rather than assuming that users or devices within your network are inherently trustworthy, Zero Trust requires authentication and verification at every step. Despite its effectiveness, many organizations misunderstand Zero Trust. As Kindervag notes, 鈥淭he objective is to stop data breaches, but to do that, you need to know what you need to protect.鈥� This foundational step is often overlooked, leading to ineffective deployments.

By recognizing that zero trust is a strategy and not a single product, organizations can take deliberate steps toward its successful implementation. The journey begins with identifying what needs protection and understanding how your systems interact. These initial steps lay the groundwork for the critical actions that follow 鈥� from mapping transaction flows to continuous monitoring.

Let鈥檚 look at the steps every organization needs to take in building a resilient security framework.

1. Define Your Protect Surfaces

To implement Zero Trust, begin by identifying what needs protection, your 鈥減rotect surfaces.鈥� These include sensitive data, applications, assets, and services. Kindervag advises starting small: 鈥淔ocus on one protect surface at a time. It makes the process incremental, iterative, and non-disruptive.鈥�

Start by using tools and conducting audits to gain a clear understanding of your environment. Identify your most valuable assets and break them into smaller, manageable protection surfaces. To make it simpler, here鈥檚 a quick look at some key areas in your operations that may need attention:

• Data: Financial records, customer information
• Applications: ERP systems, CRM platforms
• Assets:聽Servers, devices
• Services: DNS, authentication services

These initial steps establish the foundation for subsequent critical actions, including mapping transaction flows and implementing continuous monitoring.

2. Map Transaction Flows

Once you identify your protect surfaces, map the data transaction flows to understand how they interact. This step involves understanding how data and applications interact. 鈥淵ou have to see how the system works together as a system. You can鈥檛 protect what you don鈥檛 understand,鈥� Kindervag explains. This knowledge helps you identify potential vulnerabilities and ensures that your zero trust policies align with real-world data flows.

3. Enforce Identity Access Management (IAM)

IAM is essential to zero trust security. It ensures that users only access the resources they absolutely need, and only when necessary.

To effectively implement IAM, consider the following best practices:

• Implement role-based access controls (RBAC) to minimize unnecessary access.
• Use聽multi-factor authentication (MFA)聽such as passwords, biometrics, and security tokens to verify user identities. Studies have shown that MFA can effectively block 99.9% of automated cyberattacks.
• Conduct periodic audits to identify and remediate any inconsistencies or outdated access privileges.

Organizations can significantly enhance their security posture and minimize the risk of data breaches within a zero trust framework by diligently implementing this approach.

Watch: WEI Cyber Warfare & Beyond Roundtable Discussion

4. Apply Network Segmentation

Network segmentation, also known as micro-segmentation, is a cornerstone of zero trust. It limits the blast radius of potential breaches by restricting access to segmented areas within the network. Kindervag highlights its importance, stating, 鈥淪egmentation stops malicious actors from gaining access to the protect surface.鈥�

Here’s how to implement segmentation following a layered approach:

1. Employ software-defined聽micro-segmentation聽to create distinct zones within your network. This approach enhances security by isolating critical systems and data.
2. Restrict traffic flow between these zones according to the principle of least privilege. This ensures that each zone only has the necessary access to other zones and resources, minimizing the potential impact of a security breach.
3. Implement monitoring and logging capabilities to track all communication between segments. This provides valuable insights into network activity, helps identify and respond to threats promptly, and facilitates compliance with security regulations.

By controlling the 鈥渂last radius鈥� of potential breaches, this approach ensures that even if a breach occurs, its impact is contained to a limited segment of your network.

5. Implement Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring is essential to ensure your zero trust framework adapts to emerging threats. Because zero trust generates a lot of data, integrating this information into a聽modern SOC platform聽becomes effective for threat response and framework maintenance.聽

Investing in advanced monitoring tools, such as intrusion detection systems (IDS) and聽endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, provides real-time visibility into network activities. These tools detect anomalies, such as unusual login attempts or unexpected data flows, enabling swift responses to potential breaches.

6. Create And Enforce Policies

With these steps in place, the next course of action is to establish and enforce security policies. These policies clearly define the specific conditions under which access to systems and data is granted.

For instance, a policy might stipulate that access to sensitive financial records is permitted only during regular business hours, exclusively for authorized members of the finance team, and mandates the use of MFA for added security.

By adhering to a 鈥渄efault-deny鈥� principle, organizations can significantly strengthen their security posture and minimize the potential damage caused by unauthorized access.

Avoiding The Most Common Mistakes

Zero Trust is a powerful strategy, but it鈥檚 not uncommon to hit a few bumps along the way. Sometimes, organizations become too eager to implement this approach that they forget how to do it properly. Here are some familiar mistakes and areas to focus on:

1. Starting too big: It鈥檚 tempting to tackle everything at once, but trying to implement Zero Trust across your entire network can be overwhelming and costly. As Kindervag mentions, organizations should start small and focus on manageable protect surfaces, like a specific application or database. From there, you build your experience and maintain normal enterprise operations.
2. Focusing on products instead of strategy: Remember, zero trust is a mindset, not a shopping list. It鈥檚 easy to get caught up in buying tools and software, but without a clear understanding of what you鈥檙e protecting, even the best tools can fall short. Start by identifying your assets and understanding how they interact before layering in technology.
3. Neglecting policies: A well-crafted policy is your strongest ally. As Kindervag says, 鈥淎ll bad things happen within an ‘allow’ rule.鈥� Review your policies regularly and make sure they鈥檙e as precise as possible. Tight policies mean fewer opportunities for attackers to exploit gaps.

Avoiding these pitfalls simplifies the process and sets your organization up for long-term success with zero trust.

Final Thoughts

Zero trust has consistently demonstrated its effectiveness in real-world applications. Successfully implementing Zero Trust Security requires thorough planning, phased execution, and a steadfast focus on monitoring and improvement. Kindervag shares, 鈥淚n a managed services environment, we managed over 100 Zero Trust deployments. During that time, only one ransomware attack occurred, and it caused no harm.鈥� 

WEI offers the expertise to guide your organization through this transformative journey. Reach out today to learn how we can help protect your digital assets and establish a resilient zero trust framework.

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