This white paper draws on real-world incident response experience to explain how identity failures lead to cloud breaches. It follows the PICERL incident response framework to show how attackers exploit over-privileged identities, weak authentication, and poor visibility across cloud and hybrid environments. The document presents breach scenarios involving credential theft, lateral movement, ransomware, and data exfiltration. It outlines mitigation strategies including zero standing privileges, strong authentication, endpoint hardening, machine identity protection, and continuous monitoring. The paper concludes that identity-centric security is critical for preventing breaches, accelerating response, and securing modern cloud innovation.

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