The Hidden Crisis in Non-Human Identity: Why Your Security Strategy Needs an Overhaul

While organizations have spent years fortifying human identity security, a critical vulnerability has been growing in our digital infrastructure. For every human identity in today’s enterprise, there are now approximately 50 machine identities operating in the shadows. These non-human identities (NHIs) – from API keys to service accounts, from certificates to automation bots – have become a major security weakness that many organizations overlook.

The string of high-profile breaches, including incidents at Okta, Cloudflare, and the Internet Archive, all share a common thread: compromised machine identities. Yet many organizations continue to treat NHI security as an afterthought.

Industry research reveals the scope of this challenge: 46% of organizations know they have had non-human accounts or credentials compromised, with an additional 26% suspecting they might have experienced such compromises. Even more concerning, 66% of enterprises have experienced successful attacks resulting from compromised machine identities. These aren’t just isolated incidents – 25% of organizations have faced multiple such attacks.

The problem is threefold:

First, we’re dealing with an unprecedented scale. Cloud transformation and AI have created an explosion of machine-to-machine communications. Every containerized application, every microservice, and every automated workflow needs its own identity. As enterprises accelerate their AI adoption and deploy more Enterprise Agents, this proliferation of machine identities and secrets will only accelerate. These identities aren’t just growing linearly – they’re multiplying exponentially. And all these identities need to access each other on a regular basis for applications to run.
Second, traditional security tools weren’t built for this reality. While organizations have invested heavily in human IAM solutions, many lack the fundamental capabilities needed for NHI management: detection, lifecycle management, and granular access control. Current tools often fall short in securing modern infrastructure.
Third, and perhaps most critically, there’s a dangerous disconnect between security teams and DevOps. In the rush to accelerate development cycles, machine identities are often created ad-hoc, with default permissions that violate least-privilege principles. This creates significant security gaps across cloud environments.

The implications are clear. With 57% of NHI security incidents requiring board-level attention, this isn’t just a technical problem anymore – it’s a business-critical issue that demands immediate attention.

Three critical actions can help organizations address these challenges:

Implement continuous discovery and inventory of machine identities. Comprehensive visibility is essential, including understanding relationships, permissions, and usage patterns across the environment.
Adopt a unified approach to secrets management and machine identity security. Treating these as integrated rather than separate domains reduces complexity and improves visibility.
Embrace “secretless” architectures and ephemeral credentials where possible. Modern security architectures provide Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) with dynamic, short-lived credentials and also support emerging “secretless” frameworks like SPIFEE that limit potential compromise impact.

Machine identity Management has become the new security frontier. As AI and autonomous systems continue to evolve, the ratio of machine-to-human identities will only increase. Organizations that fail to adapt their security strategies accordingly face significant risks.

The data speaks for itself – secrets and machine identity security demands immediate attention. With boards already focused on this issue, security leaders must act now to protect their organizations’ future.

About: Oded Hareven is the CEO and Co-founder of Akeyless Security, the world’s first unified secrets and machine identity platform.