Use Cases

SpyCloud Investigations is designed to empower a broad range of teams – from security operations to fraud, compliance, and beyond – with access to actionable identity intelligence.

The use cases below illustrate how organizations are leveraging Investigations to uncover threats, enhance decision-making, and protect their environments from identity-centric risks.

While these examples reflect common and emerging applications across industries, they’re just the beginning. The solution's flexibility enables deeper, custom analysis tailored to your workflows, your risks, and your mission.

💳 Fraud Detection & Prevention

Need: Adversaries use stolen credentials and synthetic identities to commit account takeover, payment fraud, or application fraud.

SpyCloud Benefit: Detects compromised or fake user data early to prevent fraud at login, sign-up, or transaction.

Target Audience: Fraud, Trust & Safety

Note: High-priority for financial and e-commerce platforms.

🧾 Know Your Customer (KYC) Verification

Need: Financial institutions must verify customer identity and risk at onboarding and throughout the customer lifecycle.

SpyCloud Benefit: Enriches identity validation workflows with breach data to detect anomalies, impersonation, and synthetic IDs.

Target Audience: Fraud, Compliance, Risk

Note: Supports regulatory compliance and onboarding checks.

🧠 Attribution

Need: Security teams need to unmask actors behind attacks or infrastructure.

SpyCloud Benefit: Links exposed credentials, usernames, and emails to uncover true identities and behavioral patterns.

Target Audience: CTI, Security Operations

Note: Dramatically increase the speed of attribution across different analyst skill levels.

🔒 Trust & Safety

Need: Enterprises must protect their platforms from bots, fake accounts, abuse, and fraud.

SpyCloud Benefit: Flags bad actors by detecting reused credentials, behavioral indicators, and shared device fingerprints.

Target Audience: Trust & Safety, Platform Security

Note: Ideal fit for social, dating, gig, and gaming platforms.

🌍 Fraudulent Remote Workforce / Contractor Vetting

Need: Fraudsters pose as remote IT workers using fake identities, often from sanctioned regions.

SpyCloud Benefit: Validates worker identities and detects fraud rings using shared credentials, devices, or locations.

Target Audience: HR, Vendor Risk, Security

Note: Ideal fit for remote hiring, compliance, and offboarding.

🔗 Supply Chain Exposure Monitoring

Need: Vendors and partners often have privileged access but may be less secure than the enterprise itself.

SpyCloud Benefit: Identifies exposed credentials or infrastructure tied to third-party providers, enabling proactive partner risk assessments.

Target Audience: Vendor Risk, CTI, GRC

Note: Useful in audits, risk scorecards, or onboarding new vendors.

🧑‍💼 Internal Threat / Compromised Employee Investigation

Need: Employees may unknowingly become compromised, reuse credentials, or be targeted by malware.

SpyCloud Benefit: Enables analysts to investigate suspicious employee behavior or exposure, flagging credentials reused across personal and work accounts.

Target Audience: Security Operations, HR, Insider Threat

Note: Valuable for sensitive roles or high-risk departments. (e.g., finance, executives)

🏢 Detect Front Companies

Need: Threat actors use legitimate-looking companies to obfuscate illicit financial flows or cyber operations.

SpyCloud Benefit: Reveals domain relationships and shared infrastructure used by adversary-controlled companies.

Target Audience: CTI, AML, Legal

Note: Ideal fit for nation-state tracking and AML teams.

🚫 Sanctions Evasion Monitoring

Need: Malicious actors attempt to bypass trade or access restrictions using new identities and front companies.

SpyCloud Benefit: Detects infrastructure, credentials, and personas that connect back to sanctioned groups or countries.

Target Audience: CTI, Risk, Legal

Note: Best when used alongside export compliance tools.

🧱 Credential Stuffing Source & Protection

Need: Stolen credentials are used in automated attacks on user accounts.

SpyCloud Benefit: Detects if your users’ credentials are exposed, identifies likely attack sources, and blocks attack infrastructure.

Target Audience: Security, Fraud

Note: Enhances WAF, login protection, and fraud defense.

🛰️ Indicator of Compromise (IOC) Collection & Threat Intel Enrichment

Need: CTI teams need high-fidelity, fresh IOCs for detection, hunting, and intelligence sharing.

SpyCloud Benefit: Provides breach-derived indicators (emails, IPs, device fingerprints, etc.) for faster investigation.

Target Audience: CTI

Note: Integrates with SIEMs and threat intelligence platforms.

🧬 Actor Ecosystem & Tooling Discovery

Need: Actors often operate in groups, share tools, and reuse credentials across campaigns.

SpyCloud Benefit: Maps relationships between personas, malware infrastructure, and behavior patterns to reveal ecosystems.

Target Audience: CTI, DFIR

Note: Supports long-term adversary tracking.

🧪 Synthetic Identity Detection

Need: Fraudsters create fake identities using pieces of real and fabricated information.

SpyCloud Benefit: Flags inconsistencies and detects reused or recycled identity attributes across breaches.

Target Audience: Fraud, Risk

Note: Ideal fit for onboarding, credit fraud, and AML.

🔁 Account Reclamation & Recovery

Need: Users often lose access to accounts hijacked via credential theft.

SpyCloud Benefit: Helps support teams verify legitimate users by matching historic breach credentials to claimed identity.

Target Audience: Support, Fraud

Note: Ideal fit for low-friction identity resolution at helpdesk.

📋 Compliance Exposure Investigations

Need: Breach exposure of regulated data or systems can trigger compliance violations.

SpyCloud Benefit: Helps identify credential and identity exposures relevant to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, or FFIEC, aiding investigations and audit reporting.

Target Audience: GRC, Legal, Risk

Note: Useful during breach response, risk register updates, or compliance attestations.

🧷 Forensic Device Examination

Need: SpyCloud’s recaptured identity data is rich with credentials, like plaintext passwords, and other assets for login and accessing sensitive networks.

SpyCloud Benefit: With legal authority, SpyCloud can provide intelligence used to assist forensic examiners with accessing locked devices.

Target Audience: Organizations with legal authorization

Note: Useful to access locked devices for forensic examinations.