Red Team Tactics and Techniques

CT05 Deep-dive to Entra ID Token Theft Protection

August 4th, 2026

8:00am - 9:15am

Level: Intermediate Advanced

Nestori Syynimaa

Principal Identity Security Researcher

Microsoft

Token Theft attacks have risen during the past few years as organizations have moved to stronger authentication methods. Entra ID has built-in protections to mitigate these attacks. This session will cover how to use these protections and technical details of how they work under the hood.

Although 99 % of identity attacks are still password-related, organizations are moving to using stronger authentication methods, making these attacks obsolete. In recent years, we have witnessed a rising number of Token Theft attacks. As tokens are issued after successful login, attackers can use them to impersonate users without a need to care about the authentication methods used.

The two most often used Token Theft techniques are Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM) attacks and malware on the endpoint. The former can be performed remotely (e.g., via phishing), whereas the latter requires access to the victim’s endpoint (much harder).

In this demo-packed session, I will cover various Entra ID built-in Token Theft protection techniques, such as Token Protection and Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE). These techniques are not silver bullets though, so I will share the technical details of how they work under the hood. I will show what they really protect against, but also how threat actors can leverage them in specific scenarios.

After the session, you will know the technical details of Entra ID Token Theft protection features, how to use them, how threat actors may leverage them, and how to detect this.

You will learn:

  • Token theft attack paths
  • Which tokens threat actors are stealing
  • How Entra ID token protection features work