Austin, Texas / USA, September 9th, 2026, CyberNewswire
Ninety-five percent of organizations believe they have visibility into their AI and machine identity exposures, yet only 36% are actually monitoring them.
SpyCloud, the leader in identity threat protection, today released its annual SpyCloud Identity Threat Report, a survey-based study finding that non-human identities (NHIs) the AI agents, service accounts, API keys, and authentication tokens that connect to internal systems have become the most common route attackers take into the enterprise.
The survey found that compromised NHIs (31%) are nearly 2x as likely to be the primary entry point compared to phishing and social engineering (17%), the second-ranked answer.
NHI-related misuse was also the most commonly reported identity-based event type at 42%, yet the vast majority of organizations aren’t watching for them.
While 95% of organizations believe they have adequate visibility into AI- and NHI-related exposures, only 36% monitor them, making machine identities the least-watched category of identity risk in the report.
Further amplifying the problem, 68% of organizations experienced an identity-based event in the same period, with those affected averaging eight events each.
Organizations typically maintain a clear inventory of their human workforce, but few extend that same visibility to the service accounts, API keys, and AI agents authenticating into their systems every day.
These identities are provisioned for convenience and often hold real privilege, yet in most environments nobody owns them: a service account doesn’t get off-boarded, doesn’t rotate its own credentials, and doesn’t fail an MFA challenge, so once one is exposed it can stay usable for months.
“That asymmetry is what attackers are exploiting,” said Trevor Hilligoss, SpyCloud’s Chief Intelligence Officer. “Every one of these identities is a standing invitation that renews itself until someone notices.”
This year’s report is based on a survey of 750 cybersecurity leaders and practitioners at organizations with 500+ employees across North America (US and Canada), the United Kingdom, and select European markets Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland.
It benchmarks how organizations detect, remediate, and govern identity threats across human and non-human identities.
Additional key findings include:
AI adoption has outpaced governance. Nearly all organizations (91%) use AI tools or agents with access to internal systems, applications, or data, but only 56% have formal governance and ownership for the resulting privileges. Another 41% rely on informal processes or partial ownership, leaving shadow access privileged connections operating outside normal governance and monitoring.
Exposed session blind spots track with higher event rates. Organizations that had visibility into stolen session cookies experienced identity-based events at a meaningfully lower rate (37%) than those that could not (50%).
Session cookies and tokens let attackers bypass authentication controls like MFA by resuming an already-authenticated session. This gives them trusted access to applications and data, it’s no surprise then that SpyCloud research shows that session data has overtaken passwords as attackers’ top target.
Phishing and malware remain the delivery mechanism. Phishing and social engineering is cited as a common access path for identity events (37%) with 40% reporting incomplete visibility into successful phishing attacks, and 53% can see malware exposures on managed devices only.
Malware and exposed access top the list of supply chain identity events. Malware-infected third-party devices (23%) and exposed API keys or application access involving vendors and partners (22%) were the leading reported causes of supply chain identity events.
Third-party exposures are getting found, but not closed. Nearly 40% of organizations have no consistent process to confirm that a third-party identity exposure was actually resolved, even as 32% name enhancing supply chain and vendor risk management among their planned investments for the next 12 to 18 months.
Non-human identities and third-party exposures are creating new paths into the enterprise, while stolen sessions give attackers ways around controls designed to protect authenticated users.
“Every control that works pushes attackers toward what it doesn’t cover we hardened passwords, so they targeted sessions; we tightened employee accounts, so they looked to service accounts and vendor connections,” added Hilligoss.
“SpyCloud continues to track threat actor behavior closely to understand where attackers are moving, what data they value, and how those patterns evolve over time.”
Continuous monitoring & automation separate the most resilient identity programs
Identity exposure creates an ongoing operational burden that extends well beyond the initial incident, and how quickly organizations respond has a direct impact on business outcomes.
Those relying on manual, case-by-case remediation reported higher incident response costs than organizations with high levels of automation (39% versus 32%) and greater loss of customer or partner trust (47% versus 36%).
The report also introduces SpyCloud’s Identity Threat Protection Maturity Model, which groups respondents into four maturity tiers Reactive, Building, Operational, and Optimized across identity exposure visibility, monitoring, governance, automation, and remediation.
The findings reflect that the more mature an identity program gets, the more it relies on continuous identity exposure monitoring and automated remediation – and that combination is what actually drives incident rates down.
At enterprise scale, some share of an organization’s employees, vendors, and machine accounts will be exposed in the near future regardless of how strong its controls are. What changes business outcomes is how long that exposure stays usable.
“Most identity programs are still measured on whether an exposure happened. That’s the wrong scoreboard,” said Damon Fleury, Chief Product Officer at SpyCloud.
“Organizations that pair continuous identity monitoring with automated remediation of workforce exposures create the greatest friction for criminals and gain the biggest edge in preventing follow-on attacks.”
Users can access the full, no form-fill 2026 SpyCloud Identity Threat Report and benchmark their organization against the Identity Threat Protection Maturity Model by taking the free assessment here.
About SpyCloud
SpyCloud transforms recaptured darknet data to disrupt cybercrime. Its automated identity threat protection solutions use advanced analytics and AI to accelerate investigations and protect workforce, consumer, and supplier identities from the threats that matter most: authentication bypass, session hijacking, malicious insiders, account takeover, ransomware, and fraud.
Its data from malware-infected devices, successful phishes, combolists, and third-party breaches also powers many popular dark web monitoring and identity theft protection offerings.
Customers include 7 of the Fortune 10, along with hundreds of global enterprises, mid-sized companies, and government agencies worldwide.
Headquartered in Austin, TX, SpyCloud is home to more than 250 cybersecurity experts whose mission is to protect businesses and consumers from the stolen identity data criminals are using to target them now.
To learn more and see insights on your company’s exposed data, visit spycloud.com.
Austin, Texas / USA, September 9th, 2026, CyberNewswire Ninety-five percent of organizations believe they have visibility into their AI and machine identity exposures, yet only 36% are actually monitoring them. SpyCloud, the leader in identity threat protection, today released its annual SpyCloud Identity Threat Report, a survey-based study finding that non-human identities (NHIs) the AI […]
Menlo Park, California, USA, August 27th, 2026, CyberNewswire
AccuKnox today announced the launch of AgentZ, a platform for building, running, and governing AI agents across teams and workflows.
AgentZ brings the agent, its execution environment, tools, workflows, permissions, and governance into a single platform, so organizations can move agents from experiment to production without assembling and maintaining a stack of disconnected components.
AgentZ consolidates those pieces. The platform is built on a straightforward model of Organizations, Workspaces, Agents, Workflows, and Sandboxes, with users and roles sitting across that structure to provide centralized administration and access control.
A workflow can use an agent for computation, a sandbox for isolation, skills for reusable capabilities, credentials injected at runtime, and triggers that determine when the workflow runs.
Key Capabilities
No model lock-in. AgentZ is model-agnostic, with support for OpenAI, Claude, Grok, and other models. Teams can change the underlying LLM without rebuilding the surrounding agent infrastructure, because agents, workflows, skills, and runtime controls are kept separate from the model.
Isolated execution environments. Every agent runs inside its own sandbox with a dedicated computer and filesystem. Teams configure vCPU and RAM, filesystem read and write access, domain whitelisting, package management, environment variables, and network access, creating a defined boundary around where an agent can execute and what it can touch.
On-prem and air-gapped deployments are available for organizations with infrastructure or data residency requirements.
Visibility into what actually happened. An agent’s final response does not show the full execution path. AgentZ provides visual workflow graphs, execution traces, audit logs, workflow steps, agent activity, and tool interactions, so teams can debug and review a run rather than infer it from the output.
Structure for multiple teams. Organizations provide centralized administration while workspaces isolate teams and use cases. Users inherit access through roles, shared resources are managed centrally, and enterprise deployments can delegate computation at the workspace level.
Deployment on the organization’s terms. AgentZ supports SaaS, on-prem, and air-gapped deployment, alongside bring-your-own-LLM, giving teams control over both where the platform runs and which models power their agents.
Agentic AI platform with security built in
AccuKnox is positioning AgentZ as an AI platform with security built in rather than a security product that happens to use AI.
Security is central to the design, through zero-trust controls, tool-level permissions, and sandboxed execution, but it is not the boundary of the product.
The same platform supports a security investigation workflow, a sales intelligence workflow, a competitive intelligence workflow, an engineering automation workflow, an HR process, or recurring finance and operations tasks.
The launch roadmap spans security, sales, marketing, engineering, HR, finance, healthcare, education, and operations.
The core difference is defined around four areas: model-agnostic, deploy anywhere, secure by default, and built for organizations.
“An agent that can call tools is not the hard part. The hard part is deciding what it is allowed to touch, containing the blast radius when it gets something wrong, and being able to reconstruct the run afterwards. AgentZ puts sandboxing, tool-level permissions, and runtime credential injection underneath the workflow itself, so every team is not rebuilding those controls from scratch,” – said Rahul Jadhav, co-founder and CTO, AccuKnox.
“Most organizations are past the demo phase and are now asking a harder question, which is whether they can let agents do real work inside the business. That takes structure, not another framework,” said Nat Natraj, co-founder and CEO, AccuKnox. “AgentZ gives teams a place to build agents, run them under controls a security team will actually accept, and manage them across the organization, using their own models and their own infrastructure.” – said Nat Natraj, co-founder and CEO, AccuKnox.
About AccuKnox
AccuKnox delivers a Zero Trust Security platform for AI, API, Application, Cloud, and Supply Chain Security.
Incubated out of R&D innovator, SRI International (Stanford Research Institute), AccuKnox holds seminal Zero Trust security patents and is backed by top-tier investors including National Grid Partners, Dolby Family Ventures, Avanta Ventures, and the 5G Open Innovation Lab. https://accuknox.com
Menlo Park, California, USA, August 27th, 2026, CyberNewswire AccuKnox today announced the launch of AgentZ, a platform for building, running, and governing AI agents across teams and workflows. AgentZ brings the agent, its execution environment, tools, workflows, permissions, and governance into a single platform, so organizations can move agents from experiment to production without assembling […]
Entrar
.webp)
.webp)
