Rapid CIAM Incident Recovery and Post-Incident Enhancements

Introduction

A leading financial institution experienced a critical authentication failure when 2.7 million users were unintentionally removed from its Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) system. This resulted in widespread login failures, service downtime, and major disruptions to digital banking services. Midships was engaged to rapidly resolve the incident and implement proactive measures to prevent recurrence.

The Challenges

1. Mass Authentication Failures

   • A sudden increase in failed logins and API errors indicated that users were missing from CIAM.

   • Over 2.7 million customers were impacted, leading to service disruption.

2. Critical Business Impact

   • Essential banking services were inaccessible to these millions of affected users.

   • Executive approval for downtime was required for a system restore.

3. Operational Dependencies and Access Control Gaps

   • While Midships executed the data restore in under 20 minutes, additional delays were caused by executive approvals and access constraints.

   • Lack of proper service accounts meant that privileged production access was required, increasing security risks.

Solution

1. Rapid Incident Response and Recovery

• Root Cause Analysis Completed: Midships quickly identified the issue—a mistaken manual deletion by support personnel.

• Restoration Plan & Executive Approval: A detailed recovery plan was created within 20 minutes, and executive approval for downtime was secured within 25 minutes.

• Custom Recovery Scripts:

  • Automated scripts were developed to prevent human errors in restoration.

  • Development and testing in a lower environment were completed in 15 minutes.

• Execution of Disaster Recovery:

  • Backup files were identified and validated within 5 minutes.

  • Data restoration was completed in under 20 minutes.

  • 2.7 million user accounts were successfully restored from a known backup using the scripts created for data restoration and disaster recovery.

• Service Restoration:

  • CIAM services were restarted, ensuring that customers could log in again.

  • What could have resulted in a prolonged outage was limited to just 20 minutes, with all customers regaining access shortly after restoration was completed.

2. Post-Incident Enhancements for Security & Resilience

Following the incident, Midships proactively introduced security and operational improvements to prevent similar issues in the future.

Access Control Strengthening

• DELETE permissions removed from privileged admin accounts to prevent accidental deletions.

• New access controls enforced:

  • Read-only support accounts created for investigations.

  • Full-access accounts restricted for emergency use only.

  • Dedicated batch job service accounts introduced to eliminate reliance on privileged administrator credentials.

• Additionally, the existing passwords are rotated for the admin-level accounts.

Batch Job Review & Automation Enhancements

• All batch job scripts updated to use service accounts instead of privileged administrator credentials and ensured that these service accounts have least privileges required for the batch job.

3. Logging & Monitoring Improvements

• Identified improper logging practices that made incident investigation difficult.

• Increased log retention from 10 to 50 files to cover the logs for better forensic analysis.

• Alerts added for DELETE operations in CIAM.

• Recommended migration of logs to Splunk/ELK or any preferred log aggregation tool for enhanced visibility and real-time monitoring.

4. Operational Readiness & Faster Recovery Measures

• Introduced runbooks and structured incident response protocols to guide future incident resolution.

• Proposed development of automated regression testing and synthetic monitoring to validate production services.

• Proposed access readiness validation drills to measure response time improvements.

Conclusion

By leveraging Midships’ expertise, the financial institution rapidly recovered from a major CIAM failure while significantly improving its security, access controls, and operational resilience. Through automated recovery processes, tighter access control, and improved monitoring, the bank is now better prepared to handle future incidents efficiently and securely.

Midships specializes in proactive security hardening, CIAM optimization, and automation to ensure that financial institutions can prevent and respond to incidents efficiently. By eliminating manual interventions, strengthening role-based access controls (RBAC), and automating recovery mechanisms, Midships enables organizations to reduce resolution times, prevent unauthorized actions, and improve regulatory compliance.

For more information on how Midships can enhance your CIAM security and operational resilience, contact us at sales@midships.io.