Case Study: Multinational Financial Services Company achieves near-zero identity security vulnerabilities with Proofpoint Identity Threat Defense

Bank Reduces Identity Security Vulnerabilities to Close to Zero With Proofpoint

A national U.S. bank owned by a multinational financial services company—managing billions in assets and more than 10,000 endpoints—faced persistent identity and lateral-movement risks despite multiple siloed security controls. The cybersecurity team needed better visibility across the environment to identify exploitable gaps, accelerate remediation, and preempt attackers without disrupting critical systems.

The bank deployed Proofpoint’s Identity Threat Defense platform (Spotlight and Shadow), using an agentless deception layer and continuous discovery to surface real attacker pathways; a 60-day POC and pen tests validated the approach. Results included reducing domain administrator privileges from 350 to zero, removing high‑risk pathways to crown‑jewel assets, integrating alerts into the SIEM for targeted remediation, and materially increasing executive and board confidence in the organization’s controls.