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Management Advisory
Stolen and compromised credentials are now the single largest way attackers get in. MALA helps you close the identity gap — at zero upfront cost.
Stolen Credentials Are the #1 Way Attackers Get In
22% of breaches in 2025 began with stolen or compromised credentials — up from 16% in 2024 — averaging $4.8 million per incident.
Credential theft is no longer one risk among many — it's the leading initial access vector into most organizations, and it's getting worse, not better. IBM's 2025 research puts breaches that start with compromised credentials at an average cost of $4.8 million, with a dwell time of roughly 292 days before they're identified and contained — well above the 241-day global average, because a valid stolen credential looks like legitimate activity.
How Our Advisors Help: MALA's advisors assess your actual identity and access exposure — not just whether MFA is turned on, but whether your access model would actually contain a compromised credential before it becomes a breach.
MFA Alone Isn't Closing the Gap
Multi-factor authentication is table stakes, but attackers have adapted: infostealer malware delivered via phishing grew 84% from 2023 to 2024, harvesting session tokens and credentials at scale, and adversary-in-the-middle phishing kits are specifically built to bypass standard MFA. Roughly 16% of breaches now involve attackers using AI to accelerate these techniques.
The Real Cost: Organizations that treat MFA as the finish line, rather than one layer of a broader identity strategy, remain exposed to exactly the techniques built to get around it.
How Our Advisors Help: MALA evaluates whether your authentication approach — and the tools behind it — actually holds up against how credentials are being stolen today, including whether phishing-resistant options like passkeys make sense for your environment.
Privileged Access Sprawl Is the Silent Risk
Most mid-market organizations have far more standing privileged access than anyone realizes — admin rights granted for a one-time project and never revoked, vendor and contractor accounts that outlive the engagement, and service accounts with far broader permissions than the task requires. Every one of these is a door an attacker doesn't need to pick a lock to walk through.
The Real Cost: A single overprivileged, forgotten account can turn a minor compromise into full environment access.
How Our Advisors Help: MALA's Technology Reality Assessment includes a privileged access review — identifying orphaned accounts, excessive permissions, and vendor access that should have been revoked long ago.
Identity Across a Fragmented Environment
Most organizations run identity across a patchwork of on-premises directory services, cloud platforms, and dozens of individual SaaS applications — each with its own access model, and few of them talking to each other. Without a dedicated IAM team, that fragmentation is exactly where visibility gaps and forgotten access accumulate.
How Our Advisors Help: MALA helps you evaluate whether a unified identity approach — single sign-on, centralized provisioning and deprovisioning, and consistent access policy — makes sense for your environment, and what it would actually take to get there.
What an Identity & Access Risk Review Covers
The average breach that starts with a stolen credential takes nearly a year to catch. Most of that time is preventable.
A MALA Identity & Access Risk Review benchmarks your current authentication approach, maps privileged and vendor access across your environment, and evaluates whether your identity architecture would contain a compromised credential quickly — or let it move freely.
Typical Result: A prioritized list of access risks — from orphaned accounts to authentication gaps — ranked by how much exposure each one actually creates.
Your Advisor: Led by advisors who evaluate identity and access architecture independently of any single vendor's platform.
Request an Identity & Access Risk Review
In a 30-minute conversation, a MALA advisor will discuss your current identity and access environment and help you identify where the highest-risk gaps actually are.