CISA Confirms It: Most Breaches No Longer Begins with Malware

For decades, breach response centered on a single question: how did the malware get in? That question is no longer the right one.

Recent advisories from CISA confirm what security leaders already see in their incident reports. A significant and growing share of breaches involve no malware at all. Attackers authenticate with legitimate credentials. They operate as trusted users. Detection tools built to catch malicious binaries see nothing — because the attacker is not behaving like malware. They are behaving like an employee.

Hackers don’t break in anymore. They log in.

The Dominant Attack Vector Is Identity

CISA’s warnings identify identity abuse as the primary initial access vector. Stolen credentials. MFA bypass. Help desk resets. OAuth abuse. Session hijacking. These are not edge cases. They are the dominant path.

Legacy security architectures struggle with this because they were built on a different assumption: that compromise begins with malicious code. Identity-based intrusions begin with successful authentication. By the time defenders detect unusual activity, the attacker has already established persistence — through access that looks entirely legitimate.

Traditional MFA Was Not Built for This

Authenticator apps can be reset. Push notifications can be fatigued. Passkeys can be bypassed through enrollment abuse. Hardware tokens remain vulnerable when administrators can issue new authenticators remotely. The underlying problem is not the specific mechanism. It is the architecture. Every traditional MFA approach authenticates something the user has or knows. None of them prove the human is present.

There is a credential to steal. There is a token to replay. There is an enrollment process that can be abused. This is the gap that CISA’s advisories expose. Organizations that have deployed conventional MFA have addressed some of the surface area. They have not addressed the core vulnerability.

Token Enforces Identity at the Point of Access

Token addresses this threat model directly. Authentication requires a biometric match on the Token device itself, cryptographic binding to the domain, and physical proximity. There is no credential to steal. There is no token to replay. There is no enrollment flow that can be abused remotely.

When identity is enforced this way, identity-based intrusions do not get started. The attacker cannot log in. There is no session to abuse. There is no foothold to establish. Token shifts the security posture from detection after authentication to prevention before it — enforcing what identity was always meant to be: a living human, verified in real time.

Defending the Right Layer

CISA’s guidance reinforces an uncomfortable truth. Organizations focused primarily on endpoint and network detection are defending the wrong layer. Identity is where modern breaches start. Endpoint controls cannot compensate for authentication that can be bypassed.

Token aligns security architecture with this reality. It treats identity as a physical, human-bound property rather than a recoverable secret. That changes the attacker’s calculus. Bypassing Token requires physical access to the enrolled individual and their device simultaneously — forcing attackers back into higher-risk, operationally complex techniques that are far more detectable.

If your controls assume attackers must break in, you are already behind. Token stops attackers who log in by proving what no other authentication system can: the right human, the right device, the right place. Every time.