Impossible Travel Detection with Torq: Defend Against the Most Prominent and Expensive Breach

With widespread remote work and global access, organizations face mounting challenges in securing user identities against sophisticated threats. One critical identity risk signal is impossible travel, where a user appears to log in from two unrecognized, geographically distant locations within an unrealistic timeframe, indicating the possibility of compromised credentials or session hijacking.

Identity is the New Security Perimeter

According to IBM, stolen or compromised credentials account for up to 40% of malicious incidents in Fortune 500 companies. These breaches also rank among the most expensive, adding over $1 million in costs per incident. Despite best practices like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and employee security training, the human element remains the weakest link — 68% of breaches stem from social engineering or user error.

To address identity-driven threats efficiently, organizations must shift from reactive security models to automated, identity-centric operations (IdentityOps). Torq enables security teams to detect and remediate compromised credentials in real time without adding operational burden.

Automating Identity Threat Detection with Torq

To save security analysts from legacy systems and alert fatigue, Torq created an Impossible Travel Detection workflow to eliminate reliance on legacy, manual security processes. Torq automates Impossible Travel Detection with your existing best-of-breed toolstack. 

With 300+ integrations, this workflow can integrate with Okta, Microsoft Entra (Azure AD), Google IAM, and other leading identity providers, leveraging geolocation, user behavior analytics, and AI-driven security automation to identify and block suspicious logins instantly.

How To Detect Impossible Travel

Torq autonomously triggers its detection workflow based on successful login events from your identity access management (IAM) provider of choice (i.e., Okta, Microsoft Entra, Google IAM, etc.) and follows this streamlined identity-centric process:

1. Login Event Capture → Activates the workflow when a user logs into Okta (or another IAM solution).
2. Geolocation Analysis → Determines the IP address’s physical location via integrated intelligence tools.
3. Historical User Behavior Comparison → Compares the login’s geolocation with previous locations stored as identity baselines.
4. Distance & Speed Calculation → Uses the Haversine formula to determine the travel distance and computes implied travel speed.
5. Anomaly Detection → Flags logins that exceed a predefined speed threshold (e.g., 1,000 km/h).
6. Risk Scoring & Identity Context Awareness → Incorporates additional risk intelligence to minimize false positives.

By analyzing real-time user behavior and risk signals, Torq enables automated, intelligent decision-making to determine whether a login attempt is legitimate or an identity-based attack.

Beyond Geolocation: Intelligent Identity Threat Analysis

The power of IdentityOps lies in your ability to integrate across the security ecosystem — leveraging multiple threat intelligence and user behavior signals to detect, assess, and remediate compromised identities dynamically.

Advanced Risk Signals Integrated into Torq’s IdentityOps Workflow

Torq enriches Impossible Travel Detection with best-in-class security integrations, ensuring high-fidelity threat identification through:

• IP Reputation Enrichment → Queries VirusTotal, Recorded Future, or CrowdStrike to determine if the login originates from a known malicious or suspicious source.
• User Behavior Profiling → Establishes a historical baseline of each user’s login habits to detect anomalous patterns.
• Context-Aware Decisioning → Analyzes additional identity context, VPN usage, corporate IP addresses, and cloud service access patterns to reduce false positives.

These multi-layered identity security checks ensure precision threat detection while maintaining a seamless user experience.

User Verification and Automated Remediation

With this workflow, Torq detects potential takeovers. Then, Torq automatically engages users and security teams for real-time resolution.

Step 1: User Notification & Verification

When a potentially suspicious login is detected, Torq immediately alerts the user with a contextual security challenge:

This proactive approach serves three key purposes:

1. Alerts the user of potential credential compromise.
2. Provides contextual insight into login activity.
3. Engages users in real-time identity verification.

Step 2: Adaptive, Automated Remediation

If the login is verified as legitimate, Torq updates the user’s location history, adds a security audit log, and continues normal operations.

If the login is denied (or is ignored or times out), Torq automatically initiates remediation by:

1. Forcing an immediate password reset.
2. Sending a secure password reset link to the user via email.
3. Notifying the security team via Slack, SIEM, or ITSM.
4. Creating an incident ticket for tracking and investigation.

Optional: AI-Driven Investigation & Escalation

If a high-risk event is detected, Torq triggers an escalation workflow that can automate additional security responses — such as disabling the account, revoking OAuth sessions, or requiring reauthentication through step-up MFA.

IdentityOps with Complete Flexibility & Customization

Torq is a highly flexible, fully integrated no-code/low-code solution that allows security teams to tailor IdentityOps workflows to exact requirements with:

• Customizable risk scoring and speed thresholds
• Seamless integration with IAM, SIEM, and XDR platforms
• Adaptable remediation actions based on risk severity
• Agentic AI and AI Workflow Builder for instant, custom identity automation

Organizations can fine-tune Impossible Travel Detection to align with their unique security policies, compliance needs, and identity protection strategy.

Bringing IdentityOps to Life with Torq

By shifting to IdentityOps automation, security teams can radically transform how they detect, manage, and respond to identity threats. Torq’s Impossible Travel Detection workflow offers a scalable, intelligent, and automated approach to protecting user accounts — reducing incident response times, analyst workloads, and security gaps.

Instead of relying on reactive security controls and manual investigations, Torq proactively enforces identity security at scale — ensuring only trusted users access your most sensitive resources. 

Sign up for a demo to see it in action. Current users can start customizing the workflow template today.