This year, this year, this year did not stand out the title of ransoms and feats of zero days, which were most released this year in the report on the Verizon 2025 data investigation (DBIR)-this was what they fueled them. Quiet but consistently, two major factors played a role in some of the worst violations: the third impact and Machine’s abuse.
According to DBIR 2025, the third involvement in the violations double Year per year, jumping out 15% to 30%. In parallel, the attackers are increasingly operating machines and unverified machine accounts for access, escalation of privileges and sensitive data.
The message is clear: this is not enough to protect the users of employees. To actually defend against modern threats, organizations must manage All of the identity -Human, non-employee and machine-within a single security strategy.
Third -party risk: expanding faster than organizations can control
Today’s enterprise is a partnership patchwork: contractors, providers, business partners, managed service providers, branches and more. While this relationship provides efficiency, they also create extensive identity ecosystems. Without strong control, other persons become blind spots that have ripe for operation.
Disorders associated with third parties often follow from Bad control of life cycle – For example, the contractor account remains active after the project is completed or the business partner with excessive privileges. In 2025, DBIR notes that this trend accelerates, and it is not limited to any industry: health care, finance, production and public sector, which report the main incidents that arise from the exposition of other manufacturers.
Organizations should expand identity management to non-employee with the same rigor that applies to internal staff, providing visibility, accountability and timely deactivation in the full range of other users.
Machine identities: Hidden goalkeepers to critical systems
While human identities remain vulnerable, machine identity is even faster risk. Service accounts, boots, RPA, AI agents, API – digital labor – explode in number, often without the right ownership and supervision. As the AI agents multiply, they will push the growth of the machine’s identity – and the difficulty – even outside the fact that they are running organizations today.
This year, in 2025, DBIR revealed that the attacks based on the accounts remain the main method of initial access, and the attackers are increasingly aiming at unchecked entry machines. Unprotected machine bills were associated with major violations and escalation attacks on redemption.
Rates are growing; However, most traditional identity safety tools still treat machines as second-class citizens. That is why it is important to go beyond the special machine control to a model built for scale and automation. For a deeper immersion in the problem Check representative “Who is watching cars?”.
The only approach is no longer mandatory
The fragmented person involved in a person is no longer weakness. This is a responsibility. Managing staff in one force, third users in the other, and cars at all in the third leaves of cracks wide enough to make the attackers. They don’t need to break everything. They just need one opening.
Violations associated with other users and machine accounts are accelerated faster than those associated with internal staff-spectacular warning sign that inconsistent management causes new vulnerabilities. The reality is: Identity is an identity. A person, non-employee or machine, each identity must be properly managed, managed and entrenched in accordance with a single strategy.
Organizations that survive tomorrow’s threats are not those who try to harmonize decisions are those who admit that each person’s regulation together is the only way forward. Consolidation of identity security among employees, contractors, partners, accounts, AI bots and agents closes critical gaps, increases visibility and hardens protection when it is most important.
SailPoint helps organizations provide a complete spectrum of identity With decisions intended for today’s complex enterprises – on the scale of the enterprise. No matter what you control machine identities, or providing access that has not collaborated, SailPoint provides the only identity safety experience-the Atlas Sailpoint platform turns chaos identity into clarity.
To delve into why machine identity requires a new approach- and why a traditional person oriented person is already insufficient Explore our A series of articles from three parts Lighting what machine identity is (and why the definition matters) as machine identity developed with human identity, and why traditional control methods are not obtained in the machine world.
The gap between the safety of human and machine identity is expanding. Time to close it – before the attackers did it for you.
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