The days of cybercriminals painstakingly breaking through digital walls are rapidly giving way to a much simpler and more insidious method of infiltration: they are now walking right through the front door using stolen keys. A comprehensive analysis of the current security landscape reveals that attacks targeting digital identities have become the most significant threat vector facing organizations worldwide. This fundamental shift means malicious actors are increasingly sidestepping traditional network defenses like firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Instead, they gain access to valuable corporate data and critical systems by logging in with compromised credentials. This tactic targets a vast and growing array of identities, from current and former employees to third-party vendors and an exploding population of non-human identities, such as service accounts and autonomous AI agents. The findings paint a stark picture of widespread vulnerability, highlighting deep-seated gaps in organizational visibility and a predominantly reactive security posture that is fundamentally ill-equipped to handle the scale and sophistication of modern threats. Compounding this precarious situation is the explosive and often unsecured adoption of Artificial Intelligence, a powerful technology that is acting as a massive risk multiplier, fundamentally reshaping the entire identity attack surface.
The Shifting Security Landscape
A New Perimeter and Pervasive Blind Spots
The central theme emerging from recent security analyses is the definitive establishment of identity as the new security perimeter, rendering the old model of network-centric protection obsolete. In today’s distributed, cloud-native environments, where data and applications are accessed from anywhere, the concept of a fortified internal network has dissolved. The survey data underscores a profound and widespread challenge born from this reality: a critical lack of visibility into the vast and complex web of identities operating within and across corporate ecosystems. This “visibility gap” is consistently identified as the root cause of countless security failures, as it directly cripples an organization’s ability to proactively detect anomalous behavior, respond to emerging threats, and effectively mitigate the risk posed by compromised identities. Without a complete and contextualized understanding of who—or what—is accessing resources, security teams are effectively flying blind, unable to distinguish legitimate users from malicious actors masquerading as trusted insiders.
This foundational weakness is particularly acute in complex Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments, which now house many of an organization’s most critical applications and sensitive data stores. The sheer volume and dynamic nature of identities in these multi-cloud landscapes make manual tracking and risk assessment virtually impossible. A majority of organizations are therefore operating with significant blind spots, creating a fertile ground for attackers to exploit unmonitored or over-privileged accounts. The inability to see what is happening within their own systems makes it impossible to accurately assess risk, enforce least-privilege access policies, or detect the subtle indicators of an ongoing identity-based attack. This pervasive lack of insight is not merely a technical challenge but a strategic failure that leaves organizations perpetually vulnerable to breaches that could have otherwise been prevented with a clearer, more unified view of their entire identity fabric.
The Challenge of Fragmentation and AI Integration
Many organizations are not suffering from a deficiency of security tools but rather from an overabundance of disconnected solutions that create more problems than they solve. This phenomenon, often referred to as “tool sprawl,” results in operational fragmentation and the creation of isolated data silos. Security teams are left to grapple with multiple dashboards and disparate data sets, preventing them from forming a cohesive, unified view of their identity landscape. The direct consequence of this fragmentation is a severely delayed and inefficient response to security incidents. When an alert is triggered, analysts must waste precious time manually correlating information from various systems to understand the context and scope of the threat. This delay provides attackers with a crucial window of opportunity to navigate laterally within a network, escalate their privileges by finding other vulnerable accounts, and ultimately locate and exfiltrate the valuable data they seek. The struggle to connect the dots across a fractured security architecture means that by the time the full picture emerges, the damage is often already done.
The most significant and destabilizing new trend compounding these existing challenges is the rapid and often unsecured integration of Artificial Intelligence. AI systems are being deployed at a pace that far outstrips the development and implementation of corresponding security controls, creating a new and dangerous frontier of risk. These advanced systems are being granted unprecedented levels of access to sensitive corporate data and are increasingly capable of creating and modifying other digital identities autonomously, all while operating largely outside the purview of traditional monitoring tools. This gives rise to a new and perilous class of “non-human identities on steroids,” as some experts have described them. These AI agents vastly increase the potential attack surface by introducing thousands of dynamic, machine-generated identities that are difficult to track and secure. This trend introduces complex risks that most organizations are only just beginning to comprehend, turning a powerful business enabler into a potential Trojan horse for sophisticated cyberattacks.
Quantifying the Crisis: Key Findings and Statistics
The Overwhelming Volume of Identity-Based Breaches
The scale of the identity security problem is quantified with several key statistics that illustrate the prevailing vulnerabilities across surveyed organizations. The data firmly establishes identity as the primary threat vector, with a significant 76% of organizations reporting that identity-related attacks accounted for up to half of all their security incidents in 2024. More alarmingly, the remaining 24% of respondents stated that such attacks constituted more than half of their incidents. This finding is critical because it confirms that for every single organization surveyed, without exception, identity is a major source of security breaches. This is not a niche problem affecting a specific industry or company size; it is a universal challenge that underscores a fundamental shift in how cyber warfare is being waged. Attackers have clearly recognized that targeting credentials is a far more efficient and effective strategy than attempting to breach hardened network perimeters.
This overwhelming volume of identity-focused incidents validates the transition in attacker methodology from “breaking in” to simply “logging in.” By obtaining valid credentials through phishing, malware, or dark web marketplaces, threat actors can bypass layers of security and appear as legitimate users, making their malicious activities incredibly difficult to detect. This approach allows them to operate with stealth, often for extended periods, as they methodically explore the network, identify high-value targets, and escalate their access privileges. The statistics serve as a clear indictment of security strategies that remain overly focused on network-level defenses while neglecting the critical importance of securing every human and non-human identity. The sheer prevalence of these attacks signals an urgent need for organizations to re-evaluate their security priorities and invest in capabilities that can protect the new, identity-defined perimeter from an onslaught of credential-based threats.
A Widespread Failure in Proactive Defense and Response
The danger posed by the high volume of identity attacks is significantly compounded by a fundamental weakness in organizational visibility and preparedness. The research reveals that a majority of organizations are operating with substantial blind spots, as only 46% claimed to possess comprehensive visibility into all their human and non-human identities. This widespread lack of insight directly contributes to a predominantly reactive security posture. A mere 43% of organizations have the capability to detect identity-based risks before an incident occurs, which means the vast majority—57%—are left to respond to threats only after a compromise has already taken place. This reactive approach is an inherently weaker and more costly position, as it forces security teams to engage in damage control rather than threat prevention. Instead of identifying and revoking a dangerously over-privileged account, they are left to investigate how that account was used to exfiltrate sensitive data, a far more challenging and resource-intensive task.
When a breach inevitably occurs, the speed and effectiveness of the response are critical to minimizing the impact. However, the survey found that only 29% of organizations can determine the “blast radius”—the full potential scope and impact of an attack—within minutes. The vast majority require hours or even days to piece this information together, a perilous delay that gives attackers ample time to achieve their objectives, whether that is deploying ransomware, stealing intellectual property, or causing operational disruption. This sluggishness is attributed directly to the fragmented visibility discussed earlier, which forces security teams into a time-consuming manual data correlation process. Without a unified platform that can automatically connect the dots between an initial alert and all potentially affected systems and accounts, incident responders are left chasing ghosts, unable to act decisively when it matters most. This systemic failure in response capability leaves organizations dangerously exposed in the face of increasingly swift and sophisticated adversaries.
The AI Risk Multiplier
The recent analysis dedicates significant attention to the transformative and perilous impact of Artificial Intelligence on identity security, revealing a dangerous disconnect between the speed of AI deployment and the maturity of corresponding security practices. An alarming 95% of organizations acknowledged that their AI systems can now create or modify other identities without direct human oversight. While this capability is powerful for automation and operational efficiency, it dramatically expands the attack surface by introducing a massive number of new, dynamically generated identities that are incredibly difficult to track, manage, and secure using traditional tools. This risk is magnified exponentially by the level of access being granted to these autonomous systems. Almost four in ten of the surveyed organizations reported that their AI systems have access to between 26% and 50% of their most sensitive data, including valuable assets like customer records, proprietary financial data, and confidential trade secrets, all of which are being processed by systems that often operate beyond the reach of conventional security controls.
This confluence of autonomy and privileged access has created what many experts are calling a “false confidence” dilemma. While the same 95% of organizations expressed confidence in their ability to track their non-human identities, the report’s authors suggest this is a superficial understanding of the problem. They argue that while an organization may have a record of an AI agent’s existence in an asset inventory, it typically lacks the deeper visibility required to understand its behavior, its effective permissions, and precisely what it is doing with the sensitive data it can access. This gap between simply knowing an AI identity exists and truly understanding its activity and risk profile is a critical vulnerability. Without the ability to monitor the actions of these powerful non-human agents in real time, organizations cannot detect when an AI has been compromised or is being used for malicious purposes, turning a tool designed for innovation into a potential gateway for a catastrophic breach.
Charting a Path Toward Identity Resilience
Despite the grim outlook presented by these findings, the report indicated that organizations had begun to recognize the severity of the problem. Over 70% of respondents believed that improved identity visibility could have prevented a substantial portion of their past security incidents, ranging from 26% to 75%. In response to this growing awareness, a consensus has formed around the need for greater investment, with nearly 90% of organizations planning to increase their spending on identity security in 2026. However, the solution was not seen as simply acquiring more tools. The survey revealed that three-quarters of organizations already used between three and ten separate tools for identity visibility alone. When asked what would most improve their security posture, respondents prioritized real-time threat detection and, most importantly, unified, cross-platform visibility over the acquisition of additional point solutions. This pointed toward a necessary strategic shift away from a fragmented, tool-based approach and toward a platform-centric model. Such a model was envisioned to provide a single, correlated view across the entire identity fabric—from on-premises systems to multi-cloud and SaaS environments. This unified visibility was presented as the foundational requirement for enabling the faster detection and more effective response needed to defend against the modern, identity-centric cyber threat.
