Co-authored by Constella Intelligence and Kineviz

Most companies have no reliable way of knowing how corporate email accounts are being used, whether policies are being followed, or if critical data is being shared on unmonitored platforms. Malware does more than steal credentials. Infostealers’ bounty includes live sessions, saved credentials, browser configurations, and user interactions across infected devices throughout an organization. It reveals how employees behave, exposes how endpoints are configured, and highlights failing security policies. With such data in hand, bad actors can pinpoint an organization’s real-world weaknesses, beyond the perimeter monitored by logs or enforced by compliance checklists.  The good news is that organizations and defenders can use that same information to protect themselves and fight back.

In this third installment of the series, we explore policy violations, insecure practices, and endpoint weaknesses that silently expand the organizational attack surface. Drawing on findings from the Constella 2025 Identity Breach Report and given context by Kineviz’s visual analytics platform, we demonstrate how to use the intersection of behavioral and technical signals to expose systemic vulnerabilities before bad actors find them first.

Policy Violations: When Acceptable Use Becomes Unacceptable Risk

Acceptable Use Policies are designed to protect organizational assets by defining clear boundaries for how corporate accounts, devices, and identities should be used. But, the reality is that there is no such thing as a human firewall. Organizations can not enforce or monitor the intent or digital behavior of each employee in real time. The truth derived from infostealer data is that these boundaries are routinely ignored in day-to-day practice.

One frequently observed violation is the use of corporate email accounts to register on unauthorized platforms, whether they are social media sites, browser plugins, streaming services, or online marketplaces. In some cases, employees may be using their corporate email addresses on adult content platforms or online gambling services. Often times, these registrations are made from personal or unmanaged devices, which then become targets for malware infections. Once attackers exfiltrate credentials and session tokens, they gain access to potentially sensitive corporate resources as well as to those external services.

Whether intentional or accidental, these violations increase legal and operational risk. More importantly, they erode the boundary between internal systems and external exposure, creating opportunities for lateral compromise that security teams often cannot see until it is too late.

Password Reuse: Bridging External Infections with Internal Impact

Constella’s analysis shows that password reuse between personal and professional accounts remains one of the most common enablers of compromise. Employees frequently reuse passwords across unrelated services, often with minor variations, or use the same login combination for both internal systems and consumer applications. While this may be more convenient for the user, it opens the door to the organization if the password is compromised by a bad actor.

Organizations have no direct way to measure this behavior. Endpoint agents and IAM systems cannot detect whether a user is reusing the same password on a third-party site, nor can they prevent it unless password managers or strict vaulting practices are universally adopted and enforced. Even then, as mentioned, people find ways around them. This lack of visibility means that an employee’s compromised gaming account, shopping profile, or personal email account can silently open the door to a breach.

However, just as bad actors use the data they glean to pinpoint weaknesses for exploitation, organizations can use infostealer data to identify where and how they need to shore up their defenses. By analyzing infections at scale, companies can detect high-risk usage patterns that were invisible before.

Security teams who use Kineviz’ GraphXR can visualize data relationships, trace risk back to its origin, identify affected users and systems, and define clear priorities for containment and training.

By analyzing aggregated infections, security teams clearly see password reuse across domains and platforms. Infection analysis regularly finds credentials tied to cloud admin consoles, CI/CD tools, or customer databases side by side with consumer services or non-sanctioned applications.

Endpoint Exposure: A Reflection of Real-World Vulnerabilities

Infostealers not only extract credentials, they also capture detailed metadata about the infected environment. This includes browser versions, system configurations, running processes, antivirus products, and even clipboard contents or autofill settings. This technical context provides direct insight into which devices are most vulnerable and how malware is evading detection.

Among the findings surfaced in the 2025 report:

• Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are the most frequently targeted browsers due to their market share and extensive storage of session cookies and credentials.
• Antivirus evasion is widespread. Infostealer logs show infections on systems that report running up-to-date antivirus tools, suggesting misconfiguration, outdated signatures, or user-level bypasses.
• Infection hotspots vary significantly by geography, often correlating with weaker IT maturity or less frequent device patching and monitoring. These regions frequently include outsourced operations, contractors, or satellite offices where central control is limited.

Kineviz allows organizations to visualize these infections across office locations, endpoint types, and operating systems, enabling risk segmentation that aligns with actual exposure rather than policy assumptions.

From Static Policy to Adaptive Defense

The convergence of behavior and endpoint visibility allows organizations to shift from static security policies to contextual defense strategies. Diving into the data, gives teams the power to figure out where security policies are failing so they can focus their remediation efforts where the risk is highest.

Recommendations include:

1. Correlate identity data with device intelligence
   Combine credential exposure with endpoint metadata to understand infection conditions, identify vulnerable builds, and prioritize device-level hardening.
2. Visualize violations and usage drift
   Use graph-based analysis tools like GraphXR to group corporate identities misused on unapproved services or linked to high-risk behavioral patterns.
3. Deploy role-based awareness campaigns
   Train users on behavior as much as job function. For example, employees using the same password across services should receive targeted training and forced credential resets.
4. Monitor high-risk geographies and external partners
   Track infections across contractors, offshore teams, and unmanaged endpoints to detect weak links in distributed environments.
5. Implement policy validation with real data
   Replace static policy enforcement with continuous validation, driven by intelligence from real-world infections and endpoint activity.

Final Thoughts

Infostealers don’t just exfiltrate data. They dynamically sense policy violations, behavioral risks, and endpoint misconfigurations and can provide real benefits to the bad actors or to the organization attacked. If the information stays buried in disconnected logs, those benefits remain latent. However, if transformed into intelligence, then they can power adaptive, visual, and context-rich defense.

The absence of visibility into real employee behavior—how identities are used, where they appear, and which systems they access—creates blind spots that attackers actively exploit. No firewall can stop a user from making a poor security decision. But with deep infostealer intelligence from Constella and advanced visual analytics from Kineviz, organizations can finally see the risk for what it is, map it across users and endpoints, and act before it escalates.

Today, digital footprints are as significant as physical ones, which is why the importance of secure identity risk monitoring cannot be overstated. With the constant evolution of cyber threats, it’s crucial to implement robust strategies to protect not only personal but also professional identities from potential risks. As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, staying one step ahead requires diligence, awareness, and the right set of tools. This blog will dive into some of the best practices for ensuring effective identity risk monitoring, drawing insights from Constella Intelligence’s cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions.

Embrace Comprehensive Identity Monitoring

Comprehensive identity monitoring involves keeping a vigilant eye on various channels where personal information might be exposed, including the dark web, deep web, and more. It’s about understanding where your data could potentially be leaked or sold. Platforms like Constella Intelligence utilize AI-driven technology to scan these underground networks, providing real-time alerts and mitigating the risk of identity theft and impersonation.

Key Components of Effective Monitoring

A robust identity monitoring system should encompass the following:

• Real-Time Alerts: Immediate notifications about potential threats or breaches.
• Data Analysis: Advanced analytics to understand the nature and source of threats.
• Dark Web Surveillance: Regular scanning of hidden networks where data might be traded.

Leverage Deep OSINT Investigations

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a critical component of identity risk monitoring. By leveraging deep OSINT investigations, organizations can uncover valuable insights about potential threats. Constella Intelligence excels in this area, using a vast dataset to track the activities of bad actors. This approach is particularly beneficial for fraud investigation teams, law enforcement, and national security agencies.

Benefits of OSINT Investigations

1. Uncover hidden threats that traditional monitoring might miss.
2. Gain insights into the modus operandi of cybercriminals.
3. Enhance understanding of the landscape of cyber threats.

Implement Advanced Fraud Detection Techniques

Fraud detection is at the heart of identity risk monitoring. Advanced techniques like Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Employee (KYE), and synthetic identity fraud detection are vital. These methods help verify identities and detect anomalies that could indicate fraudulent activities. Constella Intelligence’s capabilities in these areas are powered by a sophisticated data lake, encompassing over one trillion assets across 125 countries.

Fraud Detection Best Practices

• Regular Updates: Ensure fraud detection systems are regularly updated to tackle the latest threats.
• Cross-Verification: Validate identity information across multiple sources to confirm authenticity.
• Behavioral Analysis: Monitor for unusual patterns or behaviors that deviate from the norm.

Adopt a Proactive Security Culture

Last but not least, cultivating a proactive security culture within your organization can greatly enhance identity risk monitoring. This involves educating employees about the importance of cybersecurity, ensuring they understand their role in protecting sensitive information. Constella Intelligence champions this approach, emphasizing the need for continuous learning and adaptation to new threats.

In conclusion, secure identity risk monitoring is not just a technological challenge but a strategic imperative. By implementing comprehensive monitoring, leveraging advanced investigations, and adopting a proactive security culture, organizations and individuals alike can stay protected in an increasingly interconnected world. For more insights and resources on safeguarding your digital identity, explore Constella Intelligence’s extensive offerings in cybersecurity solutions.

Co-authored by Constella Intelligence and Kineviz

As infostealer malware continues to scale in reach, automation, and precision, organizations face an increasingly urgent challenge: a lack of comprehensive visibility across their identity exposure landscape. While credential leaks and cookie thefts are often detected in isolation, without centralized and time-aware analytics, security teams cannot understand the true extent and persistence of the threat.

This article outlines the critical elements required to close this visibility gap. Using data provided by Constella’s Identity Breach Report and delivered through Kineviz’s graph-powered analytics platform, we explore how organizations can use exposure segmentation, behavioral analysis, and temporal monitoring to turn infostealer intelligence into protective action.

Visualizing Strategic Exposure: From Fragmented Incidents to Global Awareness

Identity issues frame a variety of threats. They are critical when attempting to assess which geographies are under attack, whether certain countries are more targeted by threat actors, or whether there are internal deficiencies, such as low levels of security awareness or weaker hygiene practices that lead to password or credential sharing.

The larger the organization, the greater the hazard. Why? Because identity (however defined) is the key to access every subgroup, unit, division, and device. Without a consolidated view that links infections, credentials, and threat activity across countries and business units, security and risk leaders are forced to work with fragmented signals.

The challenge is to put all of this disparate information into a context that makes it possible to choose a plan of action. In a visual environment that explicitly shows connection between data, such as Kineviz’ GraphXR, organizations can, for example, transform raw infostealer logs into dynamic, interactive intelligence maps.

Such maps allow decision-makers to explore the identity threat surface across regions, teams, and technologies, making it possible to identify hotspots.

More specifically, using the information to track password patterns across regions, an organization might discover that offices in a specific country consistently use weak or reused credentials. Or, perhaps that local employees are registering corporate email addresses on high-risk consumer platforms. Such maps could reveal that regional exposure aligns with known adversary operations or geopolitical targeting patterns.

Such operational intelligence cannot be derived from isolated alerts or static dashboards. It requires the ability to explore and interact with relational data at scale, enabling organizations to go beyond detection towards true understanding.

Temporal Trends: Seeing Exposure Over Time

Timeline-based monitoring is another key element in closing the visibility gap. Security teams need to know:

• Is our phishing training actually reducing infections?
• Did the endpoint protection upgrade in Q2 reduce exposure?
• Are infections spiking after software rollouts or travel seasons?

Tracking infostealer telemetry across time reveals trends otherwise buried in static lists. By visualizing when credentials are exfiltrated, reused, or republished on dark web markets, organizations can assess whether their controls are working—or whether attackers are simply shifting vectors.

Kineviz’ GraphXR helps analysts slice infostealer intelligence by time, helping them detect waves of infections, correlate attacks with specific events (e.g., policy changes, layoffs, partner integrations), and measure the impact of remediation efforts.

Behavioral Weaknesses: The Hidden Patterns Behind Exposure

Besides geography and time, poor identity hygiene remains a critically underexplored root cause of infostealer impact. Constella’s analysis of 2024 data revealed multiple habitual behaviors driving exposure risk:

• Password reuse across personal and corporate services remains widespread.
  Infected users routinely store both business and consumer credentials in browser autofill.
• Shared credentials in production environments, particularly among DevOps and engineering teams, continue to appear across stealer logs, suggesting systemic violations of identity isolation policies.
• Weak passwords that clearly violate corporate policy appear not only in internal systems, but on third-party platforms where employees use work credentials for unapproved services.

These behaviors persist because they are difficult to detect in real time. However, the data forms clear patterns when infostealer logs are aggregated and visualized. Visual analytics reveal behavioral clusters, groups of employees using the same root passwords, storing credentials across unrelated services, or sharing privileged access. This behavioral context enables targeted interventions, not generic awareness campaigns. Now analysts can pivot from “this account was exposed” to “this role, region, or department has a recurring pattern of weak password usage.”

From Incident Response to Exposure Management

To close the visibility gap, organizations must elevate their infostealer response from tactical containment to strategic intelligence. This transformation depends on five key strategies:

• Centralize global telemetry
  Aggregate infostealer logs, credential leaks, and identity artifacts across all organizational domains, subsidiaries, and regions.
• Visualize exposure context
  Use platforms like Kineviz to connect identity elements, employee roles, geographic regions, and session data in real time, enabling meaningful exploration and segmentation.
• Track remediation over time
  Build timeline-based workflows that show how infection rates and exposure patterns evolve after security initiatives, training campaigns, or infrastructure changes.
• Detect patterns at the organizational level
  Move beyond individual detections to surface collective risk signals, such as password reuse clusters or role-based exposure profiles.
• Translate visibility into strategic policy
  Leverage this intelligence to inform acceptable use policies, endpoint configurations, access controls, and region-specific training efforts.

Final Thoughts

The volume of exposure is no longer the primary challenge. The real threat lies in the lack of insight. Without centralized, temporal, and behavioral visibility, organizations are forced to remain reactive, merely treating symptoms while systemic vulnerabilities persist beneath the surface.

By combining Constella’s deep infostealer intelligence with the advanced visual analytics provided by Kineviz’ GraphXR, organizations gain the ability to see their exposure, not just list it. This visibility enables faster response, more effective remediation, and ultimately, better decisions to promote enterprise security.

Passkeys Are Progress, But They’re Not Protection Against Everything

The cybersecurity community is embracing passkeys as a long-overdue replacement for passwords. These cryptographic credentials, bound to a user’s device, eliminate phishing and prevent credential reuse. Major players, like Google, Apple, Microsoft, GitHub, and Okta, have made passkey login widely available across consumer and enterprise services.

Adoption isn’t limited to tech platforms, either. In 2025 alone:

• The UK government approved passkeys for NHS and Whitehall services.
• Microsoft began defaulting to passwordless authentication for new users.
• Aflac, one of the largest U.S. insurers, enrolled over 500,000 users in its first passkey onboarding wave.
• The FIDO Alliance reported that 48% of the top 100 global websites now support passkeys, with more than 100 organizations signing public pledges to adopt them.

It’s a win on many fronts, but it doesn’t solve the identity problem. Authentication controls don’t matter if the device itself is already compromised, and that’s where infostealer malware continues to exploit a critical blind spot in the industry’s rush toward passwordless security.

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Infostealers Don’t Break In, They Log In After You Do

Infostealers are lightweight malware designed to extract sensitive data from infected endpoints — no exploit required. Once installed, they collect:

• Browser-stored credentials
• Authentication tokens and session cookies
• Auto-fill and personal data
• Crypto wallets, system info, and more

The attacker doesn’t need your passkey or password. If your device is infected, they can hijack your authenticated session and access systems without ever touching a login page.

This method for stealing and reusing session artifacts is growing because it works. And in a passkey-enabled world, it’s often invisible to traditional defenses.

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Real-World Data Shows the Risk Is Growing

In Constella’s 2025 Identity Breach Report, we tracked tens of millions of infostealer logs circulating across criminal markets in a single year. These logs often include session cookies and credentials tied to executive, developer, and admin accounts.

This isn’t speculative. These artifacts are actively traded, resold, and used to infiltrate corporate environments. And in many cases, organizations discover the breach only after the stolen data shows up for sale online.

Worse, the malware behind these logs is readily available as a service. Infostealers like Lumma, Raccoon v2, and RedLine are being deployed by low-skill attackers who no longer need phishing kits or password crackers. Just infect the device and extract what’s already there.

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Passkeys Solve One Problem, But Leave Others Unaddressed

To be clear, passkeys are a powerful and necessary evolution. They eliminate phishing vectors and reduce the burden on users. But they assume the endpoint is secure, and increasingly, that assumption doesn’t hold.

If malware has access to the browser’s local storage or the filesystem where session tokens live, passkeys offer no protection. The attacker simply reuses the session token and bypasses authentication entirely.

This is the new frontier of identity-based attacks. And as more organizations adopt passkeys, device compromise and session hijacking will become the primary identity threats.

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A Shift in Strategy: From Authentication to Identity Exposure

Organizations need to rethink their approach. Instead of focusing only on the login layer, security teams must assess whether the identities behind those logins have already been exposed. That starts with extending visibility beyond the perimeter.

1. Monitor for Identity Exposure in the Wild

Track stolen credentials, session cookies, and tokens showing up in infostealer logs and underground markets. These exposures are often the first sign of a compromise.

2. Harden Device Hygiene at the Edge

Endpoint protection and EDR tools remain critical, especially for remote users and unmanaged devices. Many infostealers are delivered through phishing attachments, malicious downloads, or cracked software.

3. Reduce Session Token Lifespan

Short-lived sessions limit attacker dwell time. Pair with device fingerprinting, geo-fencing, or re-authentication triggers to detect anomalous access patterns.

4. Link Exposure to Risk with Contextual Intelligence

The next step is understanding who is exposed, not just what credentials. This requires the ability to correlate disparate data points into a unified identity profile.

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Bringing Risk Into Focus with Identity Intelligence

Constella’s Identity Risk Intelligence solutions enable organizations to surface hidden connections across exposed credentials, session artifacts, and real-world users. By stitching together breach, malware, and dark web data, we help security teams:

• Enrich identity risk scoring with real-world exposure signals
• Link consumer and corporate identities
• Prioritize high-risk individuals based on context, not guesswork

This kind of visibility helps answer questions that authentication tools can’t. When a credential is exposed, is it tied to one of your developers? An executive? An unmanaged personal device accessing corporate systems?

That context makes the difference between an alert and an urgent response.

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Final Thought: Passkeys Are a Start, Not a Solution

We’re moving in the right direction. But the rise of passkeys shouldn’t create a false sense of security. Threat actors have already adapted. They no longer need to steal credentials; they’re quietly collecting access.

Device-level compromise, not credential theft, is becoming the dominant driver of identity risk.

And if your defenses stop at the login screen, you’re not securing the full picture.

Because in today’s threat landscape, it’s not about how strong your passkey is — it’s about whether your session is already in someone else’s hands.

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Want to assess your organization’s identity exposure?

Request a threat exposure report from Constella to see if your employees’ credentials or session tokens have been compromised — and learn how identity risk intelligence can close the gap.

Co-authored by Constella Intelligence and Kineviz

Infostealer malware dominates today’s cyber threat landscape. Designed to extract credentials, cookies, session tokens, autofill data, and other forms of digital identity, infostealers operate silently, persistently, and at industrial scale. They are no longer just a precursor to other attacks—infostealers are the breach.

There are two critical vectors of risk: employee-driven and user-driven infections. Yet many organizations treat these threats uniformly, without differentiating between them. Crucially, each introduces fundamentally different threat dynamics, requiring distinct detection strategies, containment protocols, and long-term mitigations.

This article, co-authored by Constella Intelligence and Kineviz, combines large-scale infostealer telemetry data with advanced visual analytics to demonstrate how organizations can understand and contextualize these evolving exposures. The foundation of this analysis is the Constella 2025 Identity Breach Report, which tracks over 219,000 breach events, 107 billion exposed records, and 30 million infected devices observed across deep and dark web sources. GraphXR, Kineviz’ graph data analytics and visualization platform, provided the means for the analysis and visualizations.

Employee Infections: A Gateway to Internal Compromise

Infostealers that target employees directly threaten enterprise systems. Why? Attackers exfiltrate credentials from devices used to access email, cloud services, production infrastructure, or collaboration platforms. With these credentials in hand, attackers win immediate access to the operational backbone of an organization. Constella’s data shows that infostealer logs included internal credentials in 78% of recently breached companies within an examined six-month window of compromise.

More than 30% of ransomware attacks in 2024 started with access acquired through infostealer infections. Attackers deployed infostealers like LummaC2, Redline, and Vidar to extract credentials which they either resold or reused. These infections also frequently evade detection on unmanaged or BYOD (bring your own) devices, especially in hybrid work environments.

Moreover, 95.29% of credentials exposed via infostealers in 2024 were found in plaintext, a dramatic increase from the previous year. The implications are clear: attackers don’t break in when they can simply log in.

User Infections: External, Yet Highly Impactful

While user-side infections may not directly affect enterprise systems, their impact is no less severe. What makes this type of exposure so dangerous is its latent pathway into internal systems. If an organization has federated authentication, shared credentials, or weak access controls in place, attackers may escalate privileges or move laterally using external identities. With 60% of 2024 breach datasets composed of recycled credentials, attackers often combine user- and employee-exposed data to uncover new attack paths.

Employees regularly use corporate devices to access personal accounts and vice versa. Constella’s telemetry has repeatedly shown cases where session cookies and credential pairs recovered from “user” infections include logins to administrative dashboards, internal cloud environments, or IT vendor platforms.

Attackers use credentials stolen from customers or partners to take over accounts (ATO), commit fraud, and abuse platforms. This increases the operational burden on support teams, drives up fraud losses, and even introduces brand-level risk when attackers use hijacked user sessions to phish or commit fraud.

The Critical Role of Visual Analytics in Deep Infostealer Intelligence

The dynamic nature of identity exposure—where a single infostealer infection may leak credentials across dozens of unrelated services—requires a different investigative model. Security teams must move away from static analysis of email domains or leaked passwords and begin treating infostealer datasets as high-context, interconnected threat maps.

The scale and relational complexity of Constella Intelligence’s infostealer data lakes demands a way to understand its significance beyond creating lists of actors and leaks. This is where Kineviz adds critical value. Through graph-powered visual analytics, teams can explore infostealer data in real time, connecting credentials, session artifacts, device metadata, and behavioral signals across internal and external entities. This gives analyst teams the insight they need to address the security issues as an interconnected ecosystem and to create plans to mitigate them.

Kineviz’ GraphXR enables security teams to visually distinguish and separate employee infections from user-based exposures, mapping each population independently while also exploring their intersections. This structured separation is fundamental when trying to tailor containment strategies or when reporting risk by department, geography, vendor, or user segment.

Furthermore, the ability to operate at scale across millions of credentials allows analysts to extract collective intelligence from affected populations. Instead of responding to threats one by one, teams can investigate clusters—such as all developers using a compromised plugin, or all employees sharing credentials with leaked user accounts. These insights help uncover shared infrastructure, behavioral patterns, or systemic security weaknesses that wouldn’t emerge from individual case analysis.

Kineviz’s visual engine also allows threat intelligence teams to:

• Group infostealer logs by attack vector or malware family (e.g., Redline vs. Lumma)
• Identify concentrations of exposure by business unit, role, or application
• Tag and monitor known vendors, executives, or contractors as high-risk nodes
• Segment remediation by use case: phishing risk, lateral movement, ATO, privileged access, etc.

The result is a shift from flat reporting to visual, contextual threat modeling, where security teams can rapidly see, segment, and prioritize threats by relevance and business impact. Visualization is no longer a reporting feature—it is an investigative tool and a decision accelerator.

Recommendations

1. Adopt a Dual-Lens Threat Model
   Separate internal and external exposures in your detection stack—but correlate them where identity overlap is suspected.
2. Leverage Visual Graph Analysis
   Use tools like those developed by Kineviz to visually explore infostealer logs and extract macro-level patterns across users, malware types, and threat actors.
3. Operationalize Infostealer Intelligence at Scale
   Treat infostealer data as the backbone of identity threat modeling. Avoid treating incidents in isolation—group them to detect systemic exposures.
4. Track Beyond Credentials
   Monitor for session tokens, authentication cookies, and configuration artifacts. These are increasingly used to bypass MFA and impersonate users.
5. Expand Awareness Across the Organization
   Train employees, fraud teams, and risk stakeholders to understand how infostealer risk impacts them—even outside the traditional security perimeter.

Final Considerations

Infostealers are not a niche threat. They are the operational mechanism behind today’s largest-scale identity attacks. According to the Constella 2025 Identity Breach Report, nearly every major breach now involves infostealer data, reused credentials, or session artifacts obtained via these infections.

Responding effectively requires more than threat feeds, it requires context, correlation, and visibility. Through the joint power of deep infostealer intelligence from Constella and real-time visual exploration from Kineviz, organizations gain the clarity needed to defend at the speed and complexity of modern threats.

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Identity is the connective tissue of today’s enterprise. But with identity comes exposure. Credentials are being stolen, resold, and reused across the cybercriminal underground at a scale that far outpaces traditional defenses. Identity intelligence – the process of collecting, correlating, and acting on data tied to digital identities – has become a core pillar of risk management and threat detection.

This post explores how identity intelligence elevates security operations, the barriers to operationalizing it, and where we go next.

What Is Identity Intelligence?

Identity intelligence combines breach data, malware logs, and underground chatter to create a dynamic picture of identity exposure. When executed correctly, it empowers organizations to:

• Detect compromised credentials in use or circulation
• Attribute malicious activity to users or identities
• Proactively prevent account takeover, fraud, and privilege escalation

According to Gartner, identity intelligence supports both tactical response and strategic decision-making. But let’s be clear: this isn’t about theory. This is about arming teams with the right context at the right time to stop threats before they metastasize.

The Data: Where Identity Intelligence Comes From

Effective identity intelligence starts with expansive, diverse data. Critical sources include:

• Infostealer malware logs: Often overlooked, these data sets reveal credentials harvested from infected devices. They offer unfiltered insight into what adversaries see.
• Dark web forums and marketplaces: Threat actors use these platforms to sell, trade, or leak credentials. Monitoring these channels yields early-warning signals.
• Paste sites and breach repositories: Frequently used to dump credential sets, often anonymously.

The signal lies in the correlation. A breached email address by itself is noise. That same email, tied to an infostealer log, reused password, and recent dark web post? That’s actionable.

Operational Challenges and Hard Truths

Identity intelligence isn’t a plug-and-play solution. You’re dealing with:

• Data overload and false positives: Context is everything. Without it, alerts generate noise, not insights.
• Fragmented systems: Identity data is siloed across IAM tools, custom databases, Active Directory ecosystems, SIEMs, endpoint agents, and HR systems.
• Evolving threats: Infostealers are modular. TTPs shift. Credentials get reused across sectors and campaigns. Intelligence must evolve just as quickly.

The lesson? Organizations must move beyond static lists of leaked credentials. Contextual risk scoring, exposure timelines, and integration with identity providers and Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) are non-negotiable.

From Monitoring to Mitigation: Automating Identity Threat Response

Knowing a credential is exposed is one thing. Acting on it is another.

Leading security teams are baking identity intelligence into their workflows by:

• Automating password resets and MFA enforcement when credential exposure is confirmed.
• Feeding alerts into SIEM/SOAR platforms for triage and incident correlation.
• Enriching IAM systems with risk-based signals to drive access decisions.

Take Texas A&M as an example. Using identity intelligence, they identified nearly 400,000 compromised credentials, reset affected passwords, and created automated alerts. That’s not theory – that’s operational resilience.

Where Identity Intelligence Fits in Modern Cyber Strategy

As zero trust architectures mature and perimeter-based defenses fade, identity becomes both the battleground and the opportunity. Identity intelligence strengthens:

• Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) by identifying high-risk users and accounts
• Insider risk programs by detecting anomalous behavior tied to compromised identities
• Fraud and trust platforms by surfacing risky logins and behavioral outliers

And it does so without requiring another agent or console. It operates upstream of the compromise.

The Road Ahead: Machine-Scale Identity Risk Management

Looking forward, the role of machine learning in identity intelligence will only grow. It’s already being used to:

• Detect patterns in credential reuse across environments
• Predict likelihood of credential exploitation
• Reduce false positives by enriching identity signals with behavioral data

With infostealer malware on the rise and over 53 million credentials compromised in 2024 alone, intelligence automation is the only way to keep up.

Final Thought

Cybersecurity teams don’t need more alerts. They need clarity. Identity intelligence provides that clarity – surfacing real risks buried in oceans of data and aligning security efforts to the digital realities of today’s enterprise.

If your strategy isn’t integrating identity exposure intelligence, you’re flying blind. It’s time to see.

FAQs

What is identity intelligence?
It’s the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data tied to user identities to detect compromised credentials and prevent threats.

What makes identity intelligence actionable?
Context. When data from malware logs, breach dumps, and underground forums is correlated, it provides a timeline and risk score that drive smarter decisions.

How is identity intelligence operationalized?
By integrating with IAM, SOAR, and SIEM systems to automate remediation steps like password resets, MFA enforcement, and access decisions.

What are common data sources?
Infostealer logs, dark web marketplaces, paste sites, breach repositories, and direct threat actor interactions.

What’s next in identity intelligence?
AI-driven risk scoring, real-time credential monitoring, and deeper integrations with zero trust and behavioral analytics platforms.

Maxwell Zeff reports: New York state lawmakers passed a bill on Thursday that aims to prevent frontier AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic from contributing to disaster scenarios, including the death or injury of more than 100 people, or more than $1 billion in damages. The passage of the RAISE Act represents a win for the...

From Breach to Exploit: How Stolen Credentials Fuel the Underground Economy

In cybersecurity, breaches often make headlines. But what happens next – after usernames and passwords, or active session cookies, are stolen – is just as dangerous. The lifecycle of stolen credentials reveals a dark ecosystem of harvesting, trading, and exploitation. This post explores how attackers weaponize stolen logins and how defenders can disrupt the cycle with identity-centric intelligence.

Stolen Credentials: A Long Tail of Risk Most people think of stolen credentials as a one-time breach. But in reality, credentials have a life of their own. They are:

• Traded across Telegram channels and dark web forums
• Bundled into combo lists
• Sold by Initial Access Brokers (IABs)
• Used for credential stuffing, phishing, and ransomware

One high-profile example is the Colonial Pipeline breach. An attacker accessed the company’s network using a single compromised VPN credential – found in a prior breach dump, reused, and not protected by MFA. The fallout disrupted fuel supplies across the Eastern U.S.

The Stolen Credential Lifecycle in Action

1. Harvest – Phishing attacks, infostealer malware (e.g. RedLine, Raccoon), or exposed databases collect credentials at scale.
2. Distribute – Credentials are sold, leaked, or bundled into logs and combo lists on marketplaces like Genesis or Russian Market.
3. Exploit – Threat actors use stolen credentials for account takeover, initial access resale, or ransomware deployment.

The Flaw of Reactive Alerts

Browser alerts or breach notification services usually fire after credentials have already been traded or used. They rarely include:

• Origin of exposure (malware log vs. third-party breach)
• Whether the credential has been reused elsewhere
• The context for prioritization or response

Breaking the Cycle: What Proactive Looks Like

Identity-centric intelligence allows defenders to act before stolen credentials become incidents:

• Credential Pivoting: Search for reuse across other leaks and malware logs.
• Infostealer Correlation: Determine if credentials came from malware and link to infection vectors.
• Risk Scoring: Use context-aware scoring to flag risky credentials before they’re abused.

Example: Stopping an Infostealer Chain Reaction

Imagine a CISO receives an alert: the CFO’s corporate email and VPN password were found in a fresh infostealer log. Instead of waiting for signs of compromise, the security team can:

• Reset credentials immediately
• Investigate the endpoint for signs of infection
• Monitor for impersonation attempts on executive email and LinkedIn

From Reactive to Resilient

The credential lifecycle doesn’t stop at the breach. It ends when you stop it. By using proactive identity signals, security teams can:

• Shrink their credential attack surface
• Spot identity risk early
• Disrupt ransomware and fraud operations before access is used

Want to see how identity signals can disrupt the breach-to-breach cycle? Download The Identity Intelligence Playbook today.

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Executive Team’s Digital Footprint Exposure Is Real

Executives, board members, and other high-profile users carry more than just influence – they carry risk. With access to strategic assets, critical systems, and high-trust communications, these individuals are prime targets for threat actors. And in the age of oversharing, infostealers, and deepfakes, an executive’s digital footprint becomes a high-value entry point.

Why Are Executives Targeted So Aggressively?

These individuals have sprawling digital identities – corporate emails used across third-party sites, public speaking engagements, social media presence, travel announcements, and more. Attackers use this abundance of information to:

• Craft spear-phishing and impersonation campaigns
• Hijack personal and professional accounts
• Deploy infostealers to silently harvest credentials and cookies from executive devices

And unfortunately, even the most tech-savvy leaders fall into predictable patterns. Password reuse, lack of MFA, and device exemptions for frictionless access all make them vulnerable.

When Human Behavior Meets Cybercrime

Let’s get specific. Here’s how executive exposure has turned into real-world breaches:

• Mark Zuckerberg: His Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hijacked using a password (“dadada”) leaked in the 2012 LinkedIn breach. This wasn’t just about access—it was reputational damage.
• Colonial Pipeline: An inactive VPN account with a reused password—found in a breach—enabled one of the most high-profile ransomware attacks in U.S. history. MFA wasn’t enabled. The result? A fuel supply disruption across the Eastern U.S.
• Voice-Cloning Fraud: In 2019, cybercriminals used deepfake voice technology to impersonate a CEO’s voice, instructing a subordinate to wire $243K to a fraudulent account. The voice sounded real enough that no suspicion was raised—until it was too late.

The Deepfake Era Has Arrived

What used to be phishing emails has now evolved into:

• Deepfaked video and voice impersonations
• Fake Teams and Zoom meetings with AI-generated faces
• Spoofed WhatsApp messages that mimic executive tone and context

Security teams are facing not just technical exploits but psychological manipulation – crafted from breached data and AI tooling. And executives are the preferred channel for this high-leverage social engineering.

Infostealers Targeting Executive Endpoints

Threat actors know where the value lies. Infostealers like Raccoon, RedLine, and Vidar are mass-deployed to capture saved logins, cookies, and autofill data. Executive devices, often used across corporate and personal workflows, become low-friction, high-yield targets.

These logs are bundled and sold on dark web markets like Russian Market or Genesis, sometimes specifically filtered for domains like yours. One CISO’s nightmare? Seeing their CEO’s corporate login and session token available for $100 to the highest bidder.

How to Defend What Matters Most

Identity-centric digital risk intelligence provides visibility that traditional tools lack. Constella’s digital risk intelligence platform helps you:

• Continuously monitor executive credentials across breach dumps, infostealer logs, and dark web forums
• Detect impersonation attempts – email spoofing, social profile cloning, or deepfake media
• Apply identity risk scoring to high-privilege individuals to drive priority response

Final Thought
Executives won’t stop being high-value targets. But with the right visibility, proactive detection, and identity-centric alerts, you can stop their exposure from becoming your next breach.

Protect the people who protect your company. Download The Identity Intelligence Playbook today.

The Power of One: From Leaked Credential to Campaign Attribution

Attribution has always been the elusive prize in threat intelligence. The question every CISO wants answered after an attack: “Who did this?” Historically, attribution required heavy resources, deep visibility, and sometimes even luck. But in today’s world of digital risk intelligence, one leaked credential can be the thread that unravels an entire threat network.

In this blog, we explore how modern identity-centric intelligence, powered by breached data, infostealer logs, and automation, can link alias to alias, handle to hackers, and turn a compromised credential into a clear picture of adversary behavior.

The Human Flaw Behind the Keyboard

Cybercriminals may have sophisticated tools and anonymization methods—but they’re still human. And humans make mistakes. They reuse credentials across forums. They use the same Jabber ID or password for years. In the cat-and-mouse game of cyber defense, even one slip-up can be enough to expose an entire operation.

Let’s break down three real-world cases that illustrate this point:

Case 1: A Jabber ID Exposes a 15-Year Operation

The threat actor behind Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service—known as Jack, VENOM SPIDER, or LUCKY—operated in the shadows for over a decade. But Jack reused the same Jabber ID across multiple forums and channels. Investigators from eSentire connected this ID to 15 years of posts, private messages, and aliases. This single identifier allowed researchers to trace Jack’s tactics, infrastructure, and, ultimately, his real-world identity.

Case 2: The Hacker Who Infected Himself In a twist of irony, the actor known as La_Citrix infected his own machine with infostealer malware. That malware did what it was built to do: steal credentials, autofill data, browser cookies, and more. When that data showed up in an infostealer log dump, researchers realized what they were looking at. They used the recovered credentials and accounts to map La_Citrix’s criminal footprint across forums like Exploit.in. One misstep—one accidental infection—and his entire operation was exposed.

Case 3: A Reused Email Takes Down AlphaBay Alexandre Cazes, administrator of AlphaBay (once the largest dark web marketplace), used a personal email address—pimp_alex_91@hotmail.com—for system-generated emails. When a welcome message to new users contained that email in the header, investigators traced it to his real identity. One reused email address was enough to connect his online persona to his real-world self.

Pivoting to Attribution: From Clue to Confidence

These stories share a pattern: one piece of identity data exposed across breach datasets, forums, or malware logs becomes the jumping-off point for attribution. With modern tools and the right dataset, analysts can automate these pivots:

• Alias → Breach data → Forum handles
• Email → Info-stealer log → Saved accounts and behavior
• Password reuse → Cross-platform identity mapping

Why This Matters for CISOs and Threat Intel Teams

Attribution isn’t just about “naming and shaming.” It has a real security impact:

• Link incidents across time and infrastructure
• Predict future targets and attacker behavior
• Strengthen defenses against repeat offenders
• Aid law enforcement and intelligence-sharing

Modern identity-centric platforms like Constella make this practical. With one leaked credential, you can:

• Query a trillion-point breach data lake
• Automate pivots across leaked logs
• Visualize the identity graph that ties aliases together

Want to turn digital breadcrumbs into actionable attribution? Download The Identity Intelligence Playbook today.

The CISO’s View: Too Many Alerts, Too Little Context

Imagine a SOC analyst under pressure. Their screen is filled with IP addresses, malware hashes, geolocations, login alerts, and thousands of other signals. It’s a flood of noise. IOCs used to be the gold standard for cyber threat detection, but today? Attackers don’t need malware or flagged infrastructure – they just log in using valid credentials or stolen active session cookies.

In this evolving threat landscape, stolen identities – not compromised endpoints – are becoming the real front lines. CISOs and their teams are waking up to a new reality: effective threat detection must move beyond the technical and into the human layer.

• The Problem With Traditional Threat Intelligence

Indicators like IP addresses, file hashes, and domains are fleeting. Attackers rotate infrastructure constantly. Polymorphic malware shifts its signature to evade detection. A TOR exit node could belong to an innocent user. And even if you identify something suspicious – what’s next? Who is behind it? Where else have they been active?

Traditional threat intelligence might tell you what’s happening, but not who’s doing it – or how to stop them from coming back.

Identity-Centric Intelligence: A Shift in Strategy

Threats today look like normal logins. Stolen credentials from phishing kits, infostealer malware, or dark web marketplaces are used to impersonate real users. And because these credentials are valid, they often fly under the radar.

Here’s where identity-centric digital risk intelligence comes in. Instead of focusing on technical indicators alone, this approach tracks human and non-human entities:

• Has this email address appeared in multiple unrelated breach dumps?
• Is this password reused across high-risk services?
• Does this user show signs of being synthetic or impersonated?

A Real Threat Example: The Synthetic Insider

Consider a recent pattern: North Korean operatives applying for remote IT jobs in the West. These attackers used synthetic personas, AI-generated profile pictures, and stolen personal data to pass background checks. Once inside, they exfiltrated data for espionage and extortion.

Had identity intelligence been used in the hiring process—checking whether an applicant’s credentials appeared in breach datasets or were linked to known patterns of misuse—these synthetic insiders might have been caught earlier.

Looking Ahead: Identity Signals at the Core of Threat Detection and Threat Intelligence

With identity at the center of detection, attribution, and response, organizations can:

• Prioritize alerts based on exposed identity risk posture
• Correlate credential leaks with actor behavior and infrastructure
• Detect credential misuse before access is granted

Want to understand how identity signals can protect your organization? Download The Identity Intelligence Playbook today.

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Why Curated Dark Web Identity Data Is Critical for CTI and OSINT Platform Success

For platforms that serve cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and open-source intelligence (OSINT) professionals – such as link analysis tools, identity verification platforms, or investigative search engines – providing reliable dark web and breach data as part of your offering is a major value driver.

But collecting, cleaning, and operationalizing identity data from the deep and dark web is anything but straightforward.

If you want to provide users with high-confidence signals on identity compromise, persona development, or infrastructure mapping, you face serious challenges behind the scenes:

• Navigating underground sources compliantly in line with U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) guidelines
• Securing data from malware-laced and offensive content dumps
• Decoding inconsistent schemas and deduplicating massive data volumes
• Maintaining a scalable, validated ingestion pipeline that stays current as the threat landscape evolves

Managing this in-house is resource-intensive and risky – distracting your team from building the user-facing features and analytics your customers actually want.

Why Building an Internal Dark Web Collection Pipeline Rarely Pays Off

The operational, legal, and technical hurdles of sourcing and sanitizing dark web data are substantial:

• Forums shut down or migrate regularly, requiring constant source maintenance
• Many breach dumps include malware, booby-trapped files, or illicit content requiring extreme operational security measures
• Data formats vary widely, from SQL dumps to JSON logs to infostealer artifacts
• Legal gray areas exist around data acquisition and distribution without proper protocols

Without deep domain expertise, even well-funded platform teams risk introducing compliance liabilities or unscalable ingestion bottlenecks. That’s why many leaders are turning to trusted third-party providers who specialize in curated, compliant identity breach and exposure signals.

The Right Data Partner Helps You Solve Real Business Problems

By sourcing identity signals through a specialized provider, your platform can immediately power high-value use cases for your customers:

Identity Attribute Corroboration

Confirm that identity attributes (email, username, phone number) are legitimate or compromised by validating against structured breach data.

• Improve investigative confidence for OSINT users
• Enhance identity verification and fraud prevention workflows

Identity Compromise Detection

Identify exposed credentials and compromised accounts in real time – especially from infostealer logs and emerging breach leaks.

• Enable alerting, risk scoring, or step-up authentication triggers for downstream users

Identity Risk Scoring

Score identities based on breach history, exposure recency, and dark web associations.

• Feed enriched risk indicators into fraud platforms, identity verification engines, or analyst dashboards

By integrating normalized identity breach signals into your platform, you empower your customers to make faster, more confident decisions—without burdening your own team with risky or resource-draining backend operations.

Why Data Quality, Compliance, and Curation Matter

Not all breach or dark web data is created equal.

If your platform relies on raw breach dumps or unvetted infostealer collections, you risk:

• High false positive rates
• Malware exposure to internal systems
• Analyst frustration due to noisy, unusable results

Choosing a data source that emphasizes compliance, curation, and structured enrichment ensures your platform can deliver trusted intelligence at scale – and keeps your team focused on feature innovation, not dark web plumbing.

Closing Thought: Power Your Platform with Ready-to-Use Identity Signals

Your users rely on your platform to surface timely, actionable intelligence – not spend days sorting through messy breach dumps.

By integrating curated, compliant identity signals sourced from the deep and dark web, you help your customers uncover compromise, corroborate identities, and assess risk – at the speed and scale they expect.

Constella Intelligence offers the world’s largest structured identity data lake, covering breach exposures, infostealer logs, and underground forum activity. Our Threat Intelligence Identity Signals API is purpose-built for platform integration, so you can deliver identity-centric OSINT without the collection and curation burden.

Turn dark web chaos into actionable intelligence for your platform. See how Constella’s Threat Intelligence Identity Signals API delivers the curated, scalable signals you need—without the operational burden.

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At Constella, we’ve spent years analyzing how cybercriminals execute attacks that affect organizations of all sizes, whether they’re startups, local businesses, or global enterprises. One of the most revealing recent cases involves the abuse of Email Marketing Platforms like MailChimp, whose accounts are being compromised through account takeover (ATO), phishing, and social engineering tactics. These attacks are not only persistent, they’re scaling globally and affecting multiple sectors with serious consequences.

What Makes Email Marketing Platform, MailChimp, an Ideal Target?

MailChimp has long been a critical communication tool for marketing teams, tech newsletters, and even cybersecurity organizations. Access to a MailChimp account typically gives attackers:

• Full lists of subscribers and contact information
• The ability to send mass emails from a trusted source
• The potential to impersonate trusted brands and individuals
• Intelligence on marketing or internal communication strategies

Even with multi-factor authentication (MFA), many of these accounts are being accessed by bypassing traditional login processes.

How? Through the use of stolen session cookies. Infostealers, malware families designed to extract stored credentials, browser cookies, and app data, are a common threat vector. Once cookies are exfiltrated, attackers can bypass login flows entirely, rendering MFA useless.

Thousands of new fresh infections in the last few days

In just the last few days, Constella has detected +1.2K newly infected devices that contained MailChimp credentials. These are not historical records, they are fresh net new infections, actively putting sensitive accounts at risk.

What’s more, this data highlights a worrying trend: attackers are increasingly targeting corporate environments, not just personal users. Many of the domains associated with these infections belong to legitimate businesses across multiple sectors and geographies.

Global Spread: Countries Most Affected

A recent analysis of infections paints a clear picture of the global nature of this threat. The following countries are seeing the highest rates of MailChimp-related compromises in the past month:

• Mexico (13.46%)
• Australia (8.65%)
• Colombia (8.65%)
• Brazil (5.77%)
• France (5.77%)
• India (4.81%)

These infections are not just hitting random individuals; they’re breaching the digital walls of corporations, nonprofits, and educational institutions alike.

Targeted Sectors: Who’s Being Hit?

By filtering recent infostealers logs, we’ve identified that the following sectors are among the most impacted by this type of threat:

The sectors most affected include:

Education

Educational institutions continue to be attractive targets due to legacy systems and limited cybersecurity resources. These platforms often support large-scale virtual learning environments, making them vulnerable to entry points.

Marketing & Digital Media

Companies offering marketing and digital solutions are high-value targets due to the client data they process. These organizations often operate in highly connected ecosystems, making lateral movement easier for attackers once inside.

Technology & IT Services

Tech companies, including software developers and IT solution providers, also featured heavily. This sector represents both a high-risk and high-reward category for threat actors due to their access to other clients’ systems.

Retail & eCommerce

Retailers, especially smaller or niche e-commerce shops. These businesses often lack robust security teams, making them soft targets for credential harvesting and carding operations.

Healthcare & Industrial Automation

These organizations are attractive targets not just because of their mailing lists, but because of the trust associated with their brand identity. When an attacker sends an email from a legitimate MailChimp account tied to one of these domains, recipients are far more likely to open and engage with it.

Cookie Theft and MFA Bypass: A Silent Killer

Even when organizations implement MFA on their services (which, notably, isn’t universally enforced by organizations itself), attackers are finding ways in. One of the more alarming methods involves stealing authentication cookies through infostealers like RedLine, Raccoon, or Lumma, among others.

These cookies are then used to impersonate a logged-in session—allowing full access to accounts without ever needing to enter a password or second factor. It’s stealthy, effective, and often undetected until damage is done.

Constella’s Commitment

At Constella, we continuously monitor infostealer data, and exposed corporate credentials in real time. Our goal is to help businesses understand not only whether their data is exposed, but also what kind of attacks can originate from that exposure.

If your organization uses MailChimp, or if you suspect credentials may have been compromised in the past month, it’s time to take action. The threat is real, active, and spreading fast.

Want to know if your domain is affected? Reach out to our threat intelligence team, we’re here to help.

For Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), cybersecurity isn’t just about protecting networks and endpoints anymore. As businesses become more digitally connected, security threats are shifting beyond the enterprise perimeter – targeting the people at the top.

Executives, board members, and other high-profile leaders are increasingly at risk of phishing attacks, impersonation scams, and dark web exposure. Cybercriminals know that an executive’s email account, credentials, or digital identity can be the key to accessing sensitive corporate data, financial transactions, or even brand reputation.

This shift presents a huge opportunity for MSSPs. By offering executive digital risk protection, MSSPs can help clients proactively manage digital risks beyond the firewall – strengthening security postures while creating a high-value, differentiated service.

Executive Digital Risk Protection: Smart Move for MSSPs

Executive Cyber Risks Go Beyond Traditional Security Tools

Most companies already have endpoint detection, firewalls, and email security solutions in place. But even with these protections, executives are still vulnerable because:

• Their personal information is widely available online, making them easy targets for phishing and social engineering.
• Cybercriminals buy and sell leaked executive credentials on the dark web, giving them a direct way into corporate networks.
• Fake LinkedIn or Twitter profiles can impersonate executives, tricking employees, customers, or investors into engaging with a fraudulent identity.

Unlike a typical cyberattack, these threats don’t trigger alerts in a SIEM or firewall—they happen outside the company’s infrastructure, making them harder to detect. That’s where MSSPs can step in.

Proactive Threat Monitoring Adds Real Value for Clients

Executive digital protection is all about getting ahead of risks before they turn into full-blown security incidents. MSSPs can provide a critical service by monitoring:

• Dark web forums and marketplaces for leaked executive credentials.
• Social media platforms for fake accounts or impersonation attempts.
• Online mentions of executives in connection to cyber threats, fraud, or brand risks.

How Constella Hunter+ Empowers MSSPs

To offer scalable and effective executive protection, MSSPs need a powerful digital risk monitoring solution that provides real-time intelligence across multiple threat vectors.

Constella Hunter+ is a digital risk protection platform designed to give MSSPs:
✔ Comprehensive coverage of the surface, deep, and dark web to detect executive threats early.
✔ Automated alerts for leaked credentials, impersonation attempts, and emerging risks.
✔ Seamless integration with SOC operations, enabling MSSPs to provide continuous, proactive monitoring without adding operational burden.

By leveraging Hunter+, MSSPs can deliver actionable intelligence, helping clients address threats before they escalate – enhancing security postures while strengthening client trust.

Digital Risk Protection is a Differentiator in a Crowded Market

In the MSSP space, competition is fierce. Many providers offer the same core services – SOC monitoring, endpoint security, phishing protection. But executive digital protection is still an emerging area, meaning MSSPs that move fast can stand out from the competition.

• It’s a high-value, low-touch service. With the right automated intelligence tools, MSSPs can monitor executive threats without adding major overhead to security teams.
• It strengthens client relationships. Offering proactive security tailored to executives helps build trust and long-term partnerships.
• It creates new revenue streams. Many organizations are willing to invest more in security for their leadership teams – MSSPs can package digital risk protection into premium service tiers.

In short, this isn’t just another security add-on – it’s a strategic offering that aligns with how businesses think about risk.

How MSSPs Can Implement Executive Digital Risk Protection

For MSSPs looking to get started, here’s a practical approach to rolling out executive-focused security services.

Step 1: Assess Digital Exposure

The first step is understanding what’s already out there. MSSPs can help clients conduct an executive risk assessment looking at:

• Publicly available executive information (home addresses, emails, phone numbers).
• Exposed credentials from past data breaches.
• Fake or unauthorized executive social media profiles.

Step 2: Set Up Real-Time Monitoring

Using automated intelligence tools, MSSPs can track:

• Dark web activity related to executives.
• Social media and domain impersonations attempting fraud or scams.
• Mentions of executives on cybercrime forums or threat intelligence feeds.

Step 3: Guide Clients on Reducing Their Digital Footprint

MSSPs can advise executives and security teams on steps to minimize risk, such as:

• Removing personal data from public databases.
• Strengthening security settings on personal and corporate accounts.
• Training leadership teams to recognize impersonation and phishing tactics.

Step 4: Align with Corporate Security Teams

Digital risk protection works best when integrated into the broader security strategy. MSSPs should:

• Work with CISOs and IT leaders to ensure executive security aligns with overall risk management.
• Incorporate executive monitoring into existing security reports.
• Help create incident response plans for executive-specific threats.

By taking a structured, proactive approach, MSSPs can deliver executive digital protection in a way that scales and provides long-term value.

Why Now is the Right Time for MSSPs to Act

The cybersecurity industry is shifting from reactive to proactive security. Clients aren’t just looking for firewalls and endpoint protection anymore – they want intelligence-driven security that helps them stay ahead of emerging threats.

Offering executive digital protection isn’t just a smart business move – it’s a natural evolution of the MSSP role.

Next Steps for MSSPs:

✔ Start with an executive risk assessment – understand the vulnerabilities your clients face.
✔ Identify the right digital risk intelligence tools to integrate into your SOC or managed security platform.
✔ Position executive protection as a premium, proactive security service.

Security teams are looking for trusted partners who offer more than just traditional cybersecurity. MSSPs that lead the way in executive digital protection will set themselves apart, strengthen client relationships, and build new revenue opportunities in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

Executives today operate in an increasingly connected world, where their digital presence is often as visible as their professional reputation. From corporate bios and media interviews to personal social media activity, an executive’s digital footprint is extensive –and, if left unprotected, a cyber and physical security risk.

Recent high-profile incidents, including the tragic killing of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson and the Sony Pictures cyberattack, have underscored the real-world consequences of digital exposure. Cybercriminals, bad actors, and even disgruntled employees can exploit personal and professional information to launch phishing attacks, impersonation scams, and even physical threats.

To stay ahead of these risks, executives need proactive strategies to minimize their online exposure, strengthen their digital security, and protect both their personal safety and corporate reputation.

What is an Executive’s Digital Footprint?

An executive’s digital footprint includes all personal and professional information that can be found online, including:

• Personal data such as home addresses, family members & details, financial records, and phone numbers found through data brokers or public records.
• Corporate presence, including biographies on company websites, conference speaker listings, media appearances, and LinkedIn profiles.
• Leaked or stolen personal information or credentials from personal and corporate email accounts that have been exposed in past data breaches.
• Social media activity that reveals locations, travel patterns, and professional associations.

This information is an invaluable asset to any criminal, not only cybercriminals, who can use it for targeted attacks, impersonation, and even real-world threats.

Why an Unprotected Digital Footprint is a Security Risk

• Cyber Threats: Phishing and Credential Exploits

Executives are prime targets for impersonation, phishing scams and credential attacks. If an attacker gains access to an executive’s email, they can impersonate them to authorize fraudulent transactions, leak sensitive corporate data, or gain deeper access to company systems.

Real-World Example: The New York Times Cyberattack
In 2013, hackers infiltrated The New York Times after the newspaper published an article about China’s Prime Minister. The attackers gained access to reporters' emails and confidential internal documents, demonstrating how high-profile individuals are often targeted by cyber espionage.

• Physical Security Risks: Stalking and Doxxing

A digital footprint isn’t just a cyber risk—it can become a physical security threat. If an executive’s home address, travel schedule, or personal details are exposed online, they and their families become vulnerable to harassment, stalking, or worse.

Real-World Example: The Murder of UnitedHealth Executive Brian Thompson
Brian Thompson, an executive at UnitedHealth Group, was tragically shot in what law enforcement described as a targeted attack. While the full details remain under investigation, the incident has heightened concerns around executive security, particularly for those whose personal details are publicly accessible.

• Reputation and Brand Damage

Executives are the public face of their organizations. If they become the target of a cyberattack, the fallout can extend far beyond personal risk – it can impact corporate reputation, stock prices, and public trust.

Real-World Example: The Sony Pictures Cyberattack
In 2014, hackers breached Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaking confidential executive emails, employee records, and unreleased films. The attack caused severe reputational damage, disrupted operations, and led to millions in financial losses.

Executives should view digital footprint protection as part of corporate risk management, not just personal cybersecurity.

How Executives Can Protect Their Digital Footprint

Reduce Publicly Available Information

• Remove all personal information found on both public and dark web sources
• Continually monitor and adjust social media privacy settings to minimize or remove any exposures.
• Eliminate posting travel plans, family photos, or location updates online.

Monitor for Digital Threats in Real Time

• Use threat intelligence tools to track online chatter about executives.
• Monitor dark web forums for leaked credentials and impersonation attempts.
• Set up real-time alerts for mentions of executive names in hacker communities.

Strengthen Password and Authentication Security

• Use unique, complex passwords for all accounts.
• Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on email, financial, and business accounts.
• Conduct regular security audits to check for leaked credentials.

Train Executives on Digital Security Risks

• Provide social engineering awareness training to help executives spot phishing attempts.
• Educate leadership teams on deepfake threats and impersonation scams.
• Develop incident response protocols for personal cybersecurity breaches.

Align Digital and Physical Security Measures

• Work with corporate security teams to integrate cyber threat intelligence with physical protection plans.
• Implement travel security protocols for executives visiting high-risk locations.
• Use secure communication channels instead of personal messaging apps or unencrypted emails.

Path Forward: Solutions for Strengthening Executive Digital Protection

While proactive steps like removing personal data, improving password security, and limiting social media exposure can reduce risk, a truly effective executive protection strategy requires real-time digital threat monitoring.

Constella’s Hunter+ is a digital risk protection platform that provides unmatched visibility into executives’ external digital footprints, detecting threats before they escalate.

Key Features of Hunter+:

• Continuous Monitoring across the surface, deep, and dark web for executive credentials, exposed identities, and impersonations.
• Proactive Alerts for risks like network breaches, account takeovers, and leaked executive data.
• Comprehensive Awareness through an all-in-one risk dashboard covering social media, dark web forums, and exposed personal data.
• Operationalized Protection that integrates with existing SOC and response workflows, accelerating mitigation efforts.

By continuously monitoring for external digital threats, Hunter+ empowers organizations to:

• Mitigate risks before they become attacks.
• Enhance security teams’ efficiency through automated monitoring.
• Protect executives and their families from cyber and physical threats.

A Secure Executive is a Resilient Executive

The modern executive is a high-value target for cybercriminals, activists, and corporate adversaries. Protecting an executive’s digital footprint is not just a personal concern – it’s a business imperative.

By taking proactive steps to minimize digital exposure, monitor threats in real-time, and integrate digital security with physical protection, companies can reduce risks, protect corporate leaders, and safeguard their business reputation.

Want to assess your executive team’s digital exposure? Download our free executive risk checklist today and learn how Constella Hunter+ can help strengthen your security posture.

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In today’s digital age, ransomware attacks have escalated to unprecedented levels, threatening businesses of all sizes and industries. The attack on the British logistics firm Knights of Old Group (KNP Logistics) in 2023 is a grim reminder of how devastating these attacks can be. Once a thriving company with a 150-year legacy, Knights of Old was forced to cease operations due to a crippling ransomware attack, displacing over 700 employees and ending decades of business continuity.

The Fall of Knights of Old: A Timeline of Devastation

According to The Times, the attack on Knights of Old began on June 26, 2023, when threat actors infiltrated the company’s network. The attackers, leveraging stolen credentials, gained access to sensitive systems and deployed Akira ransomware. Their message, later posted online, highlighted their intention to publish the company’s corporate and customer data, further intensifying the pressure through double extortion tactics.

The attackers mocked the company, stating: “Delivering freight when you’re a knight is not as convenient. Perhaps Knight’s honor prevented them from contacting us to discuss the data we got from their network. We will share their corporate information here. There is also a database with customers’ data. Everything will be uploaded soon.”

Despite adhering to international data security standards and having cyber insurance, Knights of Old could not recover from the operational and reputational damage inflicted by the attack. By September 2023, the company had ceased operations entirely, marking a significant loss for the logistics industry.

The Rising Tide of Ransomware Attacks

The plight of Knights of Old is not an isolated incident. Ransomware attacks have surged globally, with a staggering 105% increase in incidents reported between 2022 and 2023, according to cybersecurity firm Sophos. Threat actors are becoming more organized, often using data harvested by infostealers to craft highly targeted attacks.

Infostealers, such as RedLine and Raccoon, have become critical tools in the ransomware supply chain. These malicious programs harvest login credentials, system information, and other sensitive data from compromised devices. This data is then sold on underground forums, providing ransomware gangs with the resources needed to infiltrate corporate networks.

A Growing List of High-Profile Victims

1. Colonial Pipeline (2021): Stolen VPN credentials allowed attackers to deploy ransomware, causing fuel shortages across the U.S.
2. CWT Global (2020): Attackers leveraged credentials from an infostealer to demand a $4.5 million ransom, later negotiated to $4.2 million.
3. Nvidia (2022): While primarily a data breach, the attackers used stolen data to threaten ransomware deployment.

The increasing collaboration between infostealer developers and ransomware operators highlights the importance of understanding the interconnected nature of these threats.

Lessons Learned from Knights of Old

The tragic downfall of Knights of Old underscores several critical lessons for businesses aiming to protect themselves from similar fates:

1. Invest in Proactive Security Measures: Advanced endpoint protection, continuous network monitoring, and robust incident response plans are essential.
2. Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): This can prevent attackers from using stolen credentials to access sensitive systems.
3. Conduct Regular Employee Training: Phishing remains a leading entry point for infostealers. Educating employees on recognizing and reporting suspicious activity is crucial.
4. Leverage Threat Intelligence: Monitoring the dark web for compromised credentials can provide early warning signs of potential attacks.
5. Backup Critical Data: Secure and offline backups ensure data recovery even if ransomware encryption occurs.

The Broader Implications of Ransomware’s Rise

The closure of Knights of Old is a stark example of how ransomware can dismantle even well-established organizations. As The Times article highlights, the global economy’s reliance on digital infrastructure has made businesses increasingly vulnerable to these attacks. With ransomware incidents growing in frequency and sophistication, no organization is immune.

Cybersecurity experts warn that the intertwining of infostealers and ransomware marks a new era of cybercrime. By selling harvested data to the highest bidder, infostealer operators fuel a cycle of exploitation that culminates in devastating ransomware attacks.

Conclusion

The fall of Knights of Old serves as a powerful reminder of the stakes involved in today’s cybersecurity landscape. Organizations must prioritize comprehensive defense strategies, recognizing that the cost of inaction is far greater than the investment in proactive measures.

Ransomware is not just an IT problem—it’s a business continuity crisis. By learning from incidents like Knights of Old, businesses can better prepare for the challenges ahead, ensuring their resilience in an increasingly hostile digital world.

For more insights into the evolving threat landscape, explore our detailed analyses on Constella.ai.

While many associate financial hacks with stolen funds, recent incidents reveal a more complex landscape. Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting confidential employee information, which can lead to tailored phishing attacks, extortion, reputational harm, and internal disruptions within financial institutions. This blog continues our previous exploration of cybersecurity challenges in the banking and financial sector, focusing on recent breaches highlighting evolving threats to employees and customers.

The exposure of employee data—such as organizational roles, personal contact details, and work-related credentials—has become a lucrative asset for threat actors. This information enables attackers to craft convincing phishing campaigns, impersonate executives, and infiltrate critical systems. Beyond immediate financial risks, these breaches subject employees to extortion attempts, psychological distress, and potential damage to their professional reputations. Such scenarios not only harm individuals but also undermine trust in the organization as a whole.

For customers, the risks extend far beyond compromised accounts. Even when financial details remain secure, leaked personal information such as addresses, phone numbers, or account identifiers can enable identity theft and scams. Attackers often exploit this data to impersonate individuals, apply for loans, or facilitate broader fraud.

As these breaches grow in scale and sophistication, financial institutions face mounting pressure to safeguard not just customer accounts but the broader ecosystem of sensitive data. This analysis delves into recent breaches to shed light on these pressing issues and the proactive measures required to mitigate their impact.

Recent Financial Hacks & Breaches Analyzed by Constella Intelligence

1. VTB Bank – Customer Database Breach

A post on an underground forum claims to offer data allegedly linked to VTB Bank in Russia, including over 1.9 million unique email addresses. The exposed data includes personal identifiers critical for launching identity theft or phishing attacks. Given the breadth of data compromised, customers and employees alike are at risk of targeted fraud and scams.

Exposed Fields:

• Names
• Emails
• Phone numbers
• Physical addresses
• Dates of birth

2. Izipay – Customer Data Breach

Izipay, a major payment processor in Peru, appears to have been impacted by a breach exposing 1.8 million unique email addresses. The compromised information encompasses extensive details about merchants, making this breach highly impactful. The data exposed is ripe for targeted attacks, including fraud schemes, impersonation, and extortion.

Exposed Fields:

• Customer codes
• Account information
• Company names
• Operational details
• Email addresses
• Phone numbers
• Regional identifiers
• Transaction data
• Administrative records

3. Interbank – Customer Database Breach

A user on a dark web platform has shared a post alleging that Peru’s Interbank was affected by a breach exposing over 1.7 million unique email addresses. The compromised information includes sensitive personal and account-related data, which attackers could exploit to defraud customers or execute targeted phishing campaigns.

Exposed Fields:

• Full names
• Account IDs / National IDs
• Birth dates
• Addresses
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• IP addresses
• Credit card information

4. Bank of America – Employee Directory Breach

In the United States, Bank of America reportedly experienced a breach tied to the MOVEit vulnerability, compromising more than 280k unique emails. The breach exposed extensive employee directory information, making it a prime target for attackers seeking to craft social engineering schemes. The detailed organizational data presents significant risks, including impersonation of high-ranking officials and exploitation of internal processes for financial gain.

Exposed Fields:

• Employee codes
• Login IDs
• Full names
• Email addresses
• Phone numbers
• Job titles
• Detailed organizational information

5. PrivatBank – Customer Data Leak

Data sets allegedly tied to Ukraine’s PrivatBank, including over 400 unique emails and 237 million records, are being offered for sale online. While the number of email addresses found was low, the leak’s volume and the type of data—personal identifiers like passports and full names—pose a severe risk. Cybercriminals can use this information for identity theft, document forgery, or large-scale fraudulent activities.

Exposed Fields:

• Login IDs & Emails
• Full names
• Phone numbers
• Passport information

Conclusion

These breaches illustrate the growing sophistication of cyber threats targeting financial institutions. While direct financial theft remains a concern, the exposure of employee and customer data introduces new risks, including identity theft, extortion, and reputational damage. Addressing these challenges requires proactive and comprehensive cybersecurity measures.

The recent incident involving the United Healthcare CEO has sparked critical conversations in corporate boardrooms about the evolving threat landscape and the importance of robust security measures centered around executive protection. The incident has illuminated a stark and unsettling reality: the threat landscape for senior executives is evolving in ways that demand immediate attention and action. As companies scramble to reassess their security measures, it is imperative to consider the physical and digital vulnerabilities that executives face.

A Holistic Approach to Executive Protection

Executives today operate in an interconnected world where the lines between their professional and personal lives are increasingly blurred. The NYPD’s intelligence report labeling Thompson’s killing as a “symbolic takedown” underscores how online rhetoric can translate into real-world violence. While essential for corporate visibility, social media platforms also present a proactive opportunity for companies to enhance their digital security posture by identifying and mitigating the intelligence adversaries might use to target potential vulnerabilities. Personal addresses, travel schedules, and family details are often just a few clicks away for malicious actors.

This convergence of physical and digital threats highlights the need for a holistic approach to executive protection. Security measures can no longer be confined to physical guards or alarm systems. They must also encompass robust digital strategies, including minimizing digital footprints and proactive online threat monitoring.

A Watershed Moment for Corporate Security

The aftermath of this incident has seen a surge in demand for executive protection services, highlighting the importance of shifting focus from reactionary measures to sustainable and proactive strategies that address immediate and long-term security needs. Security firms have reported unprecedented inquiries, with corporations seeking guidance on everything from enhanced mail screening to deploying residential security teams. However, the challenge lies in reacting to immediate threats and creating a sustainable, long-term security framework.

For companies of all sizes, this “watershed moment” calls for a reassessment of how security budgets are allocated. Historically viewed as a non-revenue-generating expense, security investments must now be recognized as essential to safeguarding not just individuals but also the reputation and continuity of the business itself. Proactive investment in security can also demonstrate corporate responsibility and leadership, reinforcing trust among stakeholders and the broader community. The reputational damage and operational disruption resulting from a high-profile attack can far outweigh the upfront costs of comprehensive security measures.

In the recent report “Safeguarding Executives from Attack Using TAG’s Triangle of Protection Model,” Dr. Edward Amoroso, CEO of TAG Cyber, discusses how executive/VIP protection has three pillars — Physical, Virtual and Threat.  Further, he goes on to address how integrating the triangle of protection is crucial to moving forward. 

According to this report:

“The three points of the TAG Triangle of Protection — physical protection, virtual protection, and threat reduction — are interdependent and must function cohesively to ensure executive safety. Physical security safeguards the executive from immediate harm, virtual protection shields against cyber and reputational threats, and threat reduction addresses the underlying causes of hostility, but they should all be working together.

For example, early indications from the recent situation involving the CEO of UnitedHealthcare suggest that the attacker employed social engineering methods to obtain information about the logistics of the target. While it is perhaps improper to speculate on how the murder might have been avoided, one must concede that social engineering training can be viewed as interconnected with executive physical protection.”

Moving Forward

To navigate this new paradigm, corporations must adopt a layered approach to security, including taking a hard look at virtual and threat reduction, which we explore in more detail below:

1. Digital Hygiene: Encourage executives to minimize their online presence by removing personal information, such as home addresses and details about family members. This also includes reviewing social media activity to limit exposure.
2. Proactive Threat Monitoring: Leverage advanced threat intelligence tools to identify and mitigate risks before they materialize. This includes monitoring the dark web for leaked information and analyzing online chatter for potential threats.
3. Integrated Digital and Physical Security Protocols: These protocols combine physical security measures, such as guards and secure transport, with cybersecurity defenses to address both physical and digital vulnerabilities.
4. Crisis Preparedness: Conduct regular training and drills to prepare executives and their families for various scenarios, including attempted breaches or threats during public appearances.
5. Inclusive Security Strategies: Extend protection beyond the CEO to include other senior leaders and board members, recognizing that attackers may target less apparent individuals.

Responding Faster to Threats with a Proactive Approach

Organizations must also adopt cutting-edge solutions to address the evolving threat landscape. Constella Hunter+ is a digital risk protection platform that safeguards executives and VIPs against external digital threats. By continuously monitoring their digital footprints across the surface, deep, and dark web, as well as social media, Constella Hunter+ accelerates the ability to respond to threats targeting executives and their families.

Key Features:

• Continuous Monitoring: Automatically scans for external threats across 53 languages and 125 countries, finding risks such as compromised credentials, exposed identities, and impersonations.
• Proactive Alerts: This service delivers real-time notifications for risks like network breaches, account takeovers, and exposed identities.
• Comprehensive Awareness: Offers a single-pane-of-glass view of risks across social media, deep and dark web forums, exposed identity data through breaches, data brokers, and surface web assets. 
• Customizable Threat Models: These enable tailored alerts that align with internal policies and industry-specific requirements.
• Operationalized Protection: Integrates with provisioning systems and response workflows, speeding up threat mitigation and enhancing SOC efficiency.

A Call to Action

With its unmatched visibility into external digital footprints and the industry’s most extensive collection of curated identity records, Constella Hunter+ empowers organizations to:

• Mitigate risks effectively before damage occurs.
• Enhance the effectiveness of security teams through automated monitoring.

Protect executives and their families from both cyber and physical threats.

It is hypercritical that organizations shift the paradigm around the protection of their most valuable assets.  Understanding your executive’s digital footprint and understanding cyber threats is critical before they become a physical threat. Organizations must begin to adopt a proactive and forward-thinking approach to addressing emerging threats against their executives. Boards and leadership teams must prioritize security as a core component of their governance responsibilities, including appropriating adequate resources (budgets) and fostering a culture of vigilance and preparedness, not just reactionary! Ensuring leaders’ safety and strengthening resilience in the face of emerging threats should remain a key priority and a critical layer in an organization’s overall security strategy.