Shadow IT: The Initial Access You Didn’t Log

This report outlines how threat actors exploit the visibility gap between defender asset inventories and an attacker’s externally-oriented mapping—‘shadow IT’—through five recurring intrusion patterns (unmanaged edge devices leading to ransomware, misuse of cloud storage for staging/exfiltration, OAuth persistence in unmanaged tenants, leaked developer credentials enabling cloud compromise, and domain lifecycle abuse). It argues the operational fix is continuous external footprint discovery and rapid telemetry onboarding to close the detection gap.