Identity hygiene is the practice of keeping user and admin accounts difficult to steal and abuse. It combines strong authentication, regular access review, least-privilege permissions, and monitoring for suspicious logins, password resets, and token use. Good identity hygiene reduces the chance that a single stolen password becomes full network access.
In real attacks, ransomware crews often enter through reused credentials, phishing, exposed VPNs, or abandoned accounts, then move laterally by abusing privileged logins. Defenders use multi-factor authentication, conditional access, privileged access management, and disabled legacy accounts to cut off those paths. In healthcare and other high-uptime environments, identity hygiene is especially important because remote access, clinician portals, and administrative systems are frequent targets. Strong identity controls can turn a potential intrusion into a blocked login instead of a major incident.