With one in three cyber-attacks now involving compromised worker accounts, insurers and regulators are putting far larger emphasis on id posture when assessing cyber danger.
For a lot of organizations, nonetheless, these assessments stay largely opaque. Components akin to password hygiene, privileged entry administration, and the extent of multi-factor authentication (MFA) protection are more and more influential in how cyber danger and insurance coverage prices are evaluated.
Understanding the identity-centric components behind these assessments is crucial for organizations in search of to show decrease danger publicity and safe extra favorable insurance coverage phrases.
Why id posture now drives underwriting
With the worldwide common value of a data breach reaching $4.4 million in 2025, extra organizations are turning to cyber insurance coverage to handle monetary publicity. Within the UK, protection has elevated from 37% in 2023 to 45% in 2025, however rising claims volumes are prompting insurers to tighten underwriting necessities.
Credential compromise stays probably the most dependable methods for attackers to achieve entry, escalate privileges, and persist inside an setting. For insurers, robust id controls cut back the chance {that a} single compromised account can result in widespread disruption or knowledge loss, supporting extra sustainable underwriting choices.
What insurers wish to see in id security
Password hygiene and credential publicity
Regardless of the rising use of multi-factor authentication and passwordless initiatives, passwords nonetheless play a key position in authentication. Organizations ought to pay explicit consideration to the behaviors and points that improve the danger of credential theft and abuse, together with:
- Password reuse throughout identities, significantly amongst administrative or service accounts, will increase the chance that one stolen credential results in broader entry.
- Legacy authentication protocols are nonetheless frequent in networks and steadily abused to reap credentials. NTLM persists in lots of environments regardless of being functionally changed by Kerberos in Home windows 2000.
- Dormant accounts with legitimate credentials, which act as unmonitored entry factors and sometimes retain pointless entry.
- Service accounts with never-expiring passwords, creating long-lived, low-visibility assault paths.
- Shared administrative credentials, cut back accountability and amplify the impression of compromise.
From an underwriting perspective, proof that a company understands and actively manages these dangers is commonly extra vital than the presence of particular person technical controls. Common audits of password hygiene and credential publicity assist show maturity and intent to scale back identity-driven danger.
Privileged entry administration
Privileged entry administration is a crucial measure of a company’s capacity to stop and mitigate breaches. Privileged accounts can have high-level entry to techniques and knowledge, however are steadily over-permissioned. Consequently, insurers pay shut consideration to how these accounts are ruled.
Service accounts, cloud directors, and delegated privileges exterior central monitoring considerably elevate danger. That is very true after they function with out MFA or logging.
Extreme membership in Area Admin or World Administrator roles and overlapping administrative scopes all counsel that privilege escalation could be each speedy and troublesome to include.
Poorly ruled or unknown privileged entry is usually seen as increased danger than a small variety of tightly managed directors. Safety groups can use instruments akin to Specops Password Auditor to determine stale, inactive, or over-privileged administrative accounts and prioritize remediation earlier than these credentials are abused.
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| Specops Password Auditor – Dashboard |
When figuring out the chance of a dangerous breach, the query is simple: if an attacker compromises a single account, how rapidly can they turn out to be an administrator? The place the reply is “instantly” or “with minimal effort,” premiums are likely to mirror that publicity.
MFA protection
Most organizations can credibly state that MFA has been deployed. Nonetheless, MFA solely meaningfully reduces danger when it’s persistently enforced throughout all crucial techniques and accounts. In a single documented case, the Metropolis of Hamilton was denied an $18 million cyber insurance coverage payout after a ransomware assault as a result of MFA had not been absolutely applied throughout affected techniques.
Whereas MFA isn’t infallible, fatigue assaults first require legitimate account credentials after which rely upon a person approving an unfamiliar authentication request, an end result that’s removed from assured.
In the meantime, accounts that authenticate through older protocols, non-interactive service accounts, or privileged roles exempted for comfort all provide viable bypass paths as soon as preliminary entry is achieved.
That’s why insurers more and more require MFA for all privileged accounts, in addition to for e-mail and distant entry. Organizations that neglect it might face increased premiums.
4 steps to enhance your id cyber rating
There are a lot of methods organizations can enhance id security, however insurers search for proof of progress in a couple of key areas:
- Remove weak and shared passwords: Implement minimal password requirements and cut back password reuse, significantly for administrative and repair accounts. Robust password hygiene limits the impression of credential theft and reduces the danger of lateral motion following preliminary entry.
- Apply MFA throughout all crucial entry paths: Guarantee MFA is enforced on distant entry, cloud purposes, VPNs, and all privileged accounts. Insurers more and more count on MFA protection to be complete slightly than selectively utilized.
- Cut back everlasting privileged entry: Restrict everlasting administrative rights wherever sensible and undertake just-in-time or time-bound entry for elevated duties. Fewer always-on privileged accounts straight cut back the impression of credential compromise.
- Recurrently evaluate and certify entry: Conduct routine opinions of person and privileged permissions to make sure they align with present roles. Stale entry and orphaned accounts are frequent purple flags in insurance coverage assessments.
Insurers more and more count on organizations to show not solely that id controls exist, however that they’re actively monitored and improved over time.
Specops Password Auditor helps this by offering clear visibility into password publicity inside Energetic Listing and implementing controls that cut back credential-based danger.
To grasp how these controls might be utilized in your setting and aligned with insurer expectations, communicate with a Specops professional or request a dwell demo.
