New research published Thursday by Rubrik Zero Labs reveals that the wave of artificial intelligence (AI), and agentic AI in particular, has created a “worrying gap between the expanding identity attack surface and the ability of organizations to recover from subsequent breaches.” According to the report “Identity Crisis: Understanding and Building Resilience Against Identity-Driven Threats,” the result is a rise in both non-human identities (NHIs) and agentic identities.
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Key findings revealed: 89% of organizations have “fully or partially integrated AI agents into their identity infrastructure and an additional 10% have plans to do so.” Of those surveyed, 58% estimate that, in the next 12 months, half or more of the cyberattacks they face will be “driven by agentic AI.”
Industry reports claim that NHIs now outnumber human users by a factor of 82 to 1. Furthermore, a Rubrik announcement states that as organizations integrate agents into their workflows, the growth of NHIs will continue to outpace the growth of human identities, and securing them “will become just as essential — if not more so — than securing human identities.”
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Furthermore, the report’s authors state, “as traditional network boundaries have dissolved amid migrations to the cloud, the adoption of remote work, and now agentic AI, identity is no longer just a layer of control. It has become the primary attack surface that threat actors use to gain access to IT environments.” The vast majority of today’s breaches, they write, rely on exploiting trust and valid credentials rather than bypassing network defenses.
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Security professionals need to understand that IAM tools alone will not protect or help them restore the integrity of their identity infrastructure in the event of a breach. In fact, “while 87% of IT and security leaders plan to switch their IAM providers, 60% have already switched providers in the past three years, signaling the industry’s dissatisfaction with current solutions for addressing identity-based threats. The research reveals that a comprehensive identity resilience strategy is essential for when, not if, an attack occurs.”
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