The Growing Challenge of Non-Human Identity Security
For years, enterprise cybersecurity strategies focused primarily on protecting human users. Organisations invested heavily in password management, multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection, and user awareness training, all based on the assumption that people represented the greatest identity-related risk inside IT environments. That assumption no longer reflects the way modern infrastructure operates.
Today, organisations operate with an enormous and rapidly expanding population of non-human identities. These include API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, automation workflows, AI agents, cloud workloads, IoT devices, and machine-to-machine communication systems that allow digital infrastructure to function autonomously. In many environments, these machine identities now outnumber human users by more than one hundred to one.
According to Entro Security’s 2025 Non-Human Identity & Secrets Risk Report, non-human identities now outnumber human identities by as much as 144 to 1 in enterprise environments, driven largely by cloud-native applications, automation pipelines, AI agents, and third-party integrations.
While businesses have matured significantly in the way they govern employee access, machine identities have often evolved without the same level of oversight. Many are overprivileged, poorly documented, rarely rotated, and deeply embedded into operational systems. As organisations continue accelerating cloud adoption and AI-driven automation, this gap is becoming one of the most significant challenges in cyber resilience.
Cybercriminals increasingly target non-human identities because they provide persistence and access pathways that traditional security controls frequently fail to detect. Even after compromised employee credentials have been reset or disabled, attackers can maintain access through stolen OAuth tokens, unmanaged service accounts, or long-lived API credentials operating quietly in the background.
According to CyberArk’s 2025 State of Machine Identity Security Report, 50% of organisations experienced security incidents linked to compromised machine identities during the previous year, highlighting how rapidly this attack surface is expanding.
This shift has forced security leaders to reconsider a fundamental assumption about cybersecurity architecture. Identity is no longer simply a user management issue. It has become the operational control plane for the organisation itself.
Understanding the Rise of Non-Human Identities
A non-human identity refers to any digital credential or authentication mechanism used by systems, software, services, or devices rather than individual employees. These identities enable applications and infrastructure to communicate, automate processes, access sensitive data, and execute operational tasks without direct human involvement.
Common examples include:
- Service accounts running enterprise applications
- API keys connecting cloud platforms and third-party services
- OAuth tokens granting delegated access to SaaS environments
- DevOps automation scripts and CI/CD pipelines
- AI agents managing workflows or infrastructure
- Industrial IoT systems in manufacturing environments
- Connected healthcare and medical devices
According to research referenced in Commvault’s The Non-Human Identity Crisis: Bridging the Blind Spot in Modern Data Protection & Cyber Resilience ebook, non-human identities are growing between four and ten times faster than human accounts.
For many organisations, however, visibility has not kept pace with growth.
Where the Risk Becomes Operational
The risks associated with non-human identities extend well beyond traditional enterprise IT. Increasingly, these identities are integrated directly into operational technology, healthcare systems, industrial automation platforms, and connected infrastructure where security failures can create operational or even physical consequences.
| Sector | Example of Non-Human Identity Usage | Potential Impact of Compromise |
|---|---|---|
| Financial Services | ATM service authentication and banking APIs | Fraud, transaction manipulation, sensitive data exposure |
| Manufacturing | Industrial IoT and robotic automation systems | Production disruption and integrity compromise |
| Healthcare | Imaging systems, infusion pumps, patient telemetry | Patient safety risks and healthcare outages |
| Utilities & Energy | AI-managed operational infrastructure | Service disruption and operational instability |
| Enterprise IT | Cloud service accounts and OAuth applications | Persistent access, ransomware propagation, data theft |
This comparison highlights how non-human identities underpin critical operations across sectors and the significant risks that can arise if they are compromised.
One example highlighted in the Commvault ebook involves connected medical technologies. Devices such as infusion pumps and implantable systems increasingly authenticate directly with provider networks to upload telemetry and receive operational instructions. In these scenarios, compromised identities can potentially interfere with life-critical systems.
Why Attackers Are Shifting Toward Machine Identities
Modern cybercriminal groups increasingly use human compromise primarily as an entry point before pivoting into machine identity layers that provide broader access and greater persistence.
Groups such as Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters have demonstrated how effective this approach can be. Their operations frequently begin with targeted social engineering campaigns designed to manipulate IT support teams into resetting passwords or MFA controls. Once inside an environment, attackers often transition quickly toward non-human identities, stealing OAuth tokens, compromising service accounts, or creating new privileged machine identities that allow them to remain active long after the original user account has been secured.
This strategy is effective because non-human identities often operate outside the visibility of traditional security monitoring tools. Unlike employees, machine identities do not exhibit conventional behavioural patterns, making abnormal activity significantly harder to detect through standard user-centric controls.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence has repeatedly highlighted how modern threat actors increasingly prioritise credential theft, session hijacking, and identity compromise as primary methods for gaining persistent access to enterprise environments.
The Governance Gap Organisations Are Struggling to Address
One of the most concerning aspects of the non-human identity challenge is the lack of governance maturity across enterprise environments.
Research cited within the Commvault report found that fewer than 25% of organisations have formal governance policies covering the creation or decommissioning of non-human identities, while 97% of machine identities possess permissions beyond what is required for their functional role.
This creates a dangerous combination of excessive privilege, poor visibility, and operational sprawl.
Many organisations have accumulated thousands of undocumented service accounts over years of infrastructure expansion, cloud migration projects, application deployments, and automation initiatives. Some remain active long after the projects they supported have ended. Others retain privileged access despite no longer serving a meaningful operational purpose.
CyberArk research also found that 42% of organisations lack a cohesive machine identity security strategy across business units and environments, despite 92% acknowledging machine identity security as a major component of cybersecurity strategy.
In cloud and SaaS environments, OAuth abuse has become another major concern. Attackers increasingly trick users into approving malicious applications through seemingly legitimate consent prompts. Once access is granted, these delegated permissions often survive password resets and bypass traditional authentication controls entirely.
The OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10 Project has identified machine identity governance, secret exposure, insecure workload authentication, and overprivileged service accounts as emerging enterprise security priorities.
Why Traditional Security Models Need to Evolve
Most cybersecurity programs were originally designed around protecting human users. Controls such as multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection, email filtering, and user behaviour analytics remain important, but they were never intended to govern highly autonomous machine ecosystems operating continuously behind the scenes.
Non-human identities bypass many of the assumptions built into traditional security architectures. They do not interact with email, do not log in through standard user interfaces and do not behave according to predictable employee usage patterns.
As organisations deploy increasing numbers of autonomous AI systems and AI-driven automation workflows, identity governance models designed primarily around human access are being placed under increasing pressure.
Industry frameworks including NIST Zero Trust Architecture (SP 800-207) and CISA Identity and Access Management Guidance increasingly emphasise continuous verification, least privilege access, and machine identity governance as foundational cybersecurity requirements.
Building a More Resilient Identity Strategy
The organisations making meaningful progress in this area are beginning to treat non-human identities as Tier 0 assets, placing them alongside domain controllers, cloud control planes, and privileged administrator accounts in terms of operational importance.
That shift requires a more mature and recovery-focused security strategy.
| Strategic Priority | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Elimination of static secrets | Long-lived credentials significantly increase persistence risk |
| Privileged identity governance | New service accounts and OAuth applications require strict approval workflows |
| Continuous auditing | Real-time monitoring helps identify abnormal privilege escalation quickly |
| Human-to-machine correlation | Linking user actions to machine identity changes improves early breach detection |
| Recovery-first architecture | Fast restoration of trusted identity states reduces operational impact |
This table highlights the strategic priorities organisations should address to strengthen identity security and reduce cyber resilience risks.
Preparing for the Next Phase of Identity Security
As automation, connected devices, and AI-driven operations continue to expand, non-human identities are becoming critical to business operations and an increasingly attractive target for attackers due to their elevated privileges, limited visibility, and weak lifecycle management. SureLogik helps organisations strengthen identity resilience across hybrid and cloud environments through advanced data protection, identity resilience, infrastructure recovery, and managed security services.
Working with technology partners such as Commvault, SureLogik helps businesses improve identity visibility, reduce privilege-related risk, strengthen recovery readiness, and protect critical systems through practical, recovery-focused cyber resilience strategies.
To learn more about strengthening identity resilience and protecting infrastructure from emerging machine identity threats, contact the SureLogik team for a no-obligation readiness assessment.
Source: Adapted from Commvault’s The Non-Human Identity Crisis: Bridging the Blind Spot in Modern Data Protection & Cyber Resilience ebook.