An analyst opens an identity alert: unusual sign-in, medium risk, one of forty in the queue. They review it, find nothing conclusive, and close it. A completely different tool logs a permission change as its own separate case. Neither one, on its own, looks like a breach.
Account takeovers keep moving while every individual alert still reads as harmless. Posture management scores identities in isolation: one account has excess privileges, while another skipped MFA. Case-based tooling treats each event as a ticket to triage and close. Both hand you a snapshot, but neither reconstructs what happened, because the attack was never one event. It played out as a sequence of small actions, and a snapshot cannot show a sequence.
The Risk Is in the Order
A sign-in, then a mailbox rule, then a bulk Salesforce export, minutes apart. Each one is defensible alone. Read in order, they are an account takeover in progress. The risk was never in any single case. It was in the order the cases arrived, and that is exactly the view isolated tooling throws away.
Follow the Chain, Not the Ticket
Abnormal follows the chain. PeopleBase maintains a behavioral profile for every identity, and the platform correlates activity across the surfaces an attacker actually moves through, including the notification emails that SaaS apps automatically send out when something changes. The flagged sign-in and the export five minutes later stop being two cases someone has to mentally connect. They become one story, already assembled.
The analyst stops closing tickets and starts seeing the narrative, which is the only view that says whether the attack is still going.
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