Recent years have seen organizations prioritize the security of human identities, yet a significant vulnerability has quietly emerged in digital infrastructures. Current estimates indicate that for every human identity within enterprises, there are roughly 50 machine identities operating largely unnoticed. These non-human identities (NHIs)—which include API keys, service accounts, certificates, and automation bots—represent a critical security challenge that remains largely unaddressed by many businesses.
High-profile security breaches, such as those affecting Okta, Cloudflare, and the Internet Archive, reveal a disturbing trend: compromised machine identities are often at the core of these incidents. Despite this, many organizations still treat NHI security as a secondary concern.
Research underscores the severity of this issue. A staggering 46% of organizations have acknowledged breaches involving non-human accounts or credentials, with an additional 26% suspecting similar compromises. Alarmingly, 66% of enterprises report having experienced successful attacks that stemmed from these compromised machine identities. Furthermore, 25% of organizations have endured multiple attacks of this nature, highlighting systemic vulnerabilities.
The scale of the problem is exacerbated by three interrelated factors. Firstly, the rapid adoption of cloud technologies and AI has led to an unprecedented increase in machine-to-machine communication. This necessitates unique identities for each containerized application, microservice, and automated workflow. As businesses further entrench AI capabilities and deploy Enterprise Agents, the proliferation of machine identities will only intensify, creating an exponential increase in the need for access control.
Secondly, traditional security measures are ill-suited for managing this complex reality. While significant investments have been made in human identity and access management (IAM), many organizations lack essential capabilities for effectively managing NHIs, such as detection, lifecycle management, and granular access control. Existing tools often fall short, leading to increased vulnerabilities within modern infrastructures.
Lastly, a serious disconnect exists between security teams and DevOps. In the urgency to enhance development cycles, machine identities are frequently created without proper oversight, often with default permissions that infringe upon least-privilege standards. This oversight cultivates substantial security gaps throughout cloud environments.
The implications of these challenges are significant, with 57% of NHI security incidents warranting the attention of board members. This issue has evolved from a purely technical challenge to a critical business concern that requires urgent action.
Organizations must adopt a three-pronged approach to mitigate these risks. Continuous discovery and inventory management of machine identities are imperative for maintaining comprehensive visibility, including an understanding of relationships, permissions, and usage patterns. Furthermore, a consolidated strategy for secrets management and machine identity security should be embraced, recognizing the interconnected nature of these domains. Lastly, organizations are encouraged to implement “secretless” architectures and ephemeral credentials wherever feasible, as modern frameworks can provide Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) that limit potential compromises.
As the landscape of AI and autonomous systems continues to evolve, the predominance of machine identities over human identities is expected to grow. Organizations that do not recalibrate their security strategies to reflect this reality are likely to encounter significant risks. Immediate attention to secrets and machine identity security is essential, as boards are increasingly prioritizing this issue. Security leaders must respond proactively to safeguard the future of their organizations.
About: Oded Hareven is the CEO and Co-founder of Akeyless Security, the world’s first unified secrets and machine identity platform.
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