Access Is the New Exposure: Why Knowing Who Can Reach Your Data Matters More Than Where It Lives

Key Takeaways

• Cyera Research Labs’ latest field investigations show that most high-risk exposures are not caused by data misplacement but by identity-driven access paths-many of them inherited, stale, indirect, or created unintentionally through SaaS and AI tooling.
  
• Traditional DSPM and posture tools surface where data lives, but routinely miss who can reach it through ACL inheritance, group nesting, residual vendor access, link-based sharing, and privilege drift.
  
• Access intelligence-correlating identities, entitlements, and data-is now essential to enforce least privilege, detect insider threats, prevent data leakage in SaaS systems, and maintain regulatory control over sensitive information.

The Story Starts in the Field: What We Found When We Looked at Access, Not Just Data

Across dozens of enterprise environments, Cyera Research Labs kept encountering the same pattern:

data classified and stored “securely,” yet exposed through access paths no one had visibility into.

And these weren’t edge cases-they were systemic:

• Residual Vendor Access:
  OAuth-connected apps and vendor groups still retained read access to financial and HR folders in M365 months after contracts ended.
  
• Nesting Explosions:
  A single “Engineering All” group in Azure AD expanded into 42 nested subgroups, ultimately granting access to files containing production secrets, salary sheets, and migration plans.
  
• Link-Level Exposures:
  In Google Drive, critical documents marked “internal only” were silently exposed through old “anyone with the link” permissions-permissions that do not surface in typical DLP or posture dashboards.
  
• Dormant Identities With Active Privileges:
  Deactivated or “on hold” HR accounts still held access to thousands of sensitive documents because SaaS entitlements were not revoked during offboarding.
  

These issues did not appear in traditional data scans.

They emerged only when we correlated identity + entitlements + data.

That correlation-identity-aware exposure detection-is the missing dimension of modern data security.

Why Traditional Data Security Misses the Real Exposure Path

For years, security programs optimized for the question:

“Where does the sensitive data live?”

Data catalogs, classification engines, DLP, and DSPM all orbit this location-based worldview.

But modern environments-cloud-native, SaaS-first, identity-driven-don’t leak data because of location alone.

They leak because of access propagation:

• IAM roles granting transitive access via group membership
  
• SaaS sharing links bypassing folder-level ACLs
  
• Third-party OAuth access tokens operating under user scopes
  
• Legacy service accounts with high-privilege access
  
• AI assistants operating via user impersonation
  

The real risk emerges when identities-not infrastructure-become the primary attack surface.

Identity Extension Through AI: The New Amplifier of Old Problems

Consider Dan, a mid-level employee with broad but unintentional access to a long-forgotten SharePoint site.

Buried deep in nested folders lie:

• raw financial forecasts
  
• salary spreadsheets
  
• negotiation prep docs
  
• org restructuring drafts
  

Historically, Dan would never search for these.

But Dan now uses an AI assistant (Cursor, Copilot, Claude for Enterprise, etc.) that:

• authenticates with Dan’s OAuth token
  
• inherits his file-system entitlements
  
• can recursively scan directories
  
• can summarize, extract, and reformat sensitive content
  

So when Dan asks:

“Give me a sense of how the business is performing.”

…the assistant surfaces files he never knew existed.

This is identity extension through AI-a new operational reality where:

• Access ≠ Intent
  
• Permissions ≠ Human behavior
  
• Entitlements now power software agents, not employees
  

And if a user’s access is too broad, an AI assistant becomes a high-speed crawler turning “buried but accessible” into “instantly exposed.”

This is why access intelligence is no longer optional.

Why Access Intelligence Matters Now-Technically, Not Theoretically

1. Identity-Based Attacks Are Outpacing Perimeter and DLP Controls

Cyera Labs continues to uncover failures rooted not in malware, but in entitlement drift:

• Shared mailboxes with >100 users and no audit trails
  
• Privilege creep where contractors accumulate roles across projects
  
• Shadow SaaS instances with unmanaged group permissions
  
• Files duplicated across personal and shared drives, bypassing governance policies
  

These are identity failures masquerading as data problems.

2. Compliance Enforcement Requires Proven Access Governance

Frameworks like GDPR, PCI, FedRAMP, and emerging AI governance standards increasingly measure:

• who can access sensitive data
  
• whether that access is justified
  
• how access is monitored
  
• how quickly it can be revoked
  

Without identity-data correlation, organizations cannot prove control.

3. Zero Trust Breaks Without Entitlement Transparency

Least privilege cannot be enforced when:

• groups nest inside groups inside groups
  
• SaaS objects inherit permissions non-transitively
  
• service accounts accumulate privileges across decades
  
• offboarding processes don’t fully propagate revocations
  

Zero Trust without access intelligence is just “trust, but with extra dashboards.”

How Cyera Delivers Identity-Aware Data Protection

Cyera’s platform introduces continuous, high-resolution access intelligence by correlating:

• identity directories (human, machine, service)
  
• IAM roles, groups, nested permissions
  
• SaaS sharing states
  
• OAuth scopes
  
• data classification and lineage
  
• real-time usage signals
  
• AI agent interaction pathways
  

Core Technical Capabilities

• Access Graph Mapping
  Builds a full identity-to-data graph across AWS, GCP, Azure, M365, Google Workspace, Slack, and more. Supports inherited, nested, and transitive permissions.
  
• Risk-Based Access Anomaly Detection
  Identifies excessive entitlements, unused privileges, broad access groups, AI-proxy-enabled exposures, and cross-domain sharing anomalies.
  
• Remediation Orchestration
  Automatically generates least-privilege recommendations and integrates with IAM + ITSM systems for revocation, restriction, or policy enforcement.
  

This turns what was previously a one-off audit into a living access posture.

Final Thoughts: Identity Is the Perimeter. Access Is the Exposure.

Data no longer exists in neat silos.

It flows across cloud, SaaS, and AI ecosystems where identities-not storage-determine exposure.

If your security strategy ends at:

“I know where my sensitive data lives.”

you are missing the part attackers (and AI assistants) exploit most:

“Who-and what-can access my sensitive data, and how?”

This is the new frontier Cyera Research Labs is charting in the wild every day.

And it’s where true data security in the AI era begins.

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