As NHIs become the dominant population in enterprise environments, organizations must evolve their IAM strategies to keep up. That evolution starts with expanding the definition of identity to match the autonomous operations of many systems today.
At this year’s RSA Conference, non-human identities (NHIs) emerged as one of the most urgent and fastest-growing challenges in security. In some cases, these digital entities now outnumber human users by a factor of 50:1, an exponential imbalance that is only increasing as organizations scale up their integration of automation and agentic AI.
While they may not be widely known, the security risks posed by NHIs are nothing new. Improper management of non-human access has prompted several recent cyberattacks and breaches, including ones impacting Cloudflare and the U.S. Treasury Network. These incidents involved compromised or misused non-human credentials, including under protected API Keys, misconfigured workloads, and poorly managed service accounts, giving attackers persistent yet quiet access to critical and sensitive systems.
As agent-to-agent communication becomes a standard feature of enterprise workflows, NHIs are quickly surfacing as one of the most significant vectors for attack. Despite their prevalence, they often lack the same level of security measures as human identities in identity and access management (IAM) strategies, with enterprises overlooking NHIs despite their volume and operational reach. In many cases, they are introduced across engineering, cloud, and vendor ecosystems with no clear ownership assigned for managing their access or monitoring their activity.
For many organizations, this is unfamiliar territory, as these non-human identities are often set up ad hoc as needed and not centrally managed. Most IAM practitioners have extensive experience managing human access, but few have well-established processes, accountability structures, or tools to govern the rapidly expanding world of NHIs.
Failing to incorporate NHIs into core security posture puts organizations at risk, not only from external compromise but from over-permissioned APIs, misconfigured agents, and automation introduced without proper security oversight.
New identities mean new risks
When it comes to identity and credential management, human users are the default focus. A compromised employee account can be used to bypass controls, access sensitive systems, or move laterally, often without raising red flags right away. So, the emphasis in IAM has traditionally been placed on implementing the protective controls around these accounts.
But NHIs introduce an entirely new kind of threat. Unlike human users, NHIs operate continuously in the background and at machine speed, often with persistent access across multiple systems. When a bot, script, or API token is compromised, the impact on an organization can be immediate and far-reaching.
Most IAM deployments have historically focused on the identity lifecycle of human identities, and they often overlook that many of the same controls should be used when managing NHIs. Best practices like least privileged access should be universally applied, but they frequently are narrowly implemented. This mismatch has created persistent blind spots in how organizations govern non-human identities, including:
Limited visibility: Many security teams lack centralized visibility of NHIs across cloud and on-prem systems, making it difficult to assess exposure or enforce policy.
Weak credential hygiene: Static credentials, long-lived tokens, and hard-coded secrets are still common and often reused across environments without rotation.
Excessive access: NHIs frequently receive broad, persistent privileges because their roles aren’t clearly defined, expanding the blast radius in cases of compromise.
No lifecycle ownership: Unlike human identities, NHIs rarely follow a formal lifecycle. Orphaned accounts linger long after they’re needed, creating low-hanging fruit for attackers.
Even active identities can lack accountability; it’s not always clear who owns an NHI’s access decisions or who is responsible for retiring it when its role changes. These conditions create a perfect storm of highly privileged identities operating across critical systems, often without the same oversight or auditability that gets applied to human users.
Rethinking insider threats in an automated landscape
As the number of NHIs grows, so does their potential to become high-impact security liabilities in daily operations. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink what qualifies as an insider threat.
It is no longer limited to disgruntled employees or misused credentials. In many environments, insiders now include automation scripts, machine learning agents, and other forms of autonomous code. These entities often have high levels of access and permissions and are connected to mission-critical processes. When they’re compromised, the damage can ripple across systems quickly.
We can’t treat NHIs like human users and assume they’ll behave the same. When these identities are misused or simply misconfigured, they can have a rapid, large-scale impact. Traditional detection tools and access monitoring are not necessarily tuned to pick up anomalies in automated behavior, and least privilege principles aren’t always extended to machine actors.
Without consistent enforcement of controls or clear ownership, NHIs can fly under the radar until they’re exploited, leaving security teams to respond only after the damage is done and the opportunity for containment has passed.
Rethinking insider risk through the lens of automation requires a shift in how teams think about behavior, intent, and identity, especially in environments where agent-to-agent communication is normalized and rarely policed.
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Incorporating NHIs into identity-first security
Securing NHIs doesn’t require reinventing IAM. It means applying the same fundamentals we’ve already established for human users, including verifying every identity, limiting access based on need, monitoring behavior continuously, and enforcing ownership and lifecycle discipline. Identity-first security needs to include all identities, not just the ones sitting behind a screen.
That includes:
Comprehensive identity inventories that cover human and non-human accounts across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
Credential hygiene practices like automated key rotation and expiration policies for all NHIs.
No “set it and forget it” permissions: Granular access governance, with clearly defined scopes and just-in-time access for machine identities.
Cybersecurity is fundamentally an identity challenge, and that now includes the identities we can’t see or aren’t yet equipped to secure. As NHIs become the dominant population in enterprise environments, organizations must evolve their IAM strategies to keep up. That evolution starts with expanding the definition of identity to match the autonomous operations of many systems today.
This is more than just a scale issue; it’s one of visibility, governance, and trust in increasingly autonomous systems. Identity-first security is the only way to ensure that the speed of digital transformation doesn’t come at the cost of resilience.