We locked the entrance door. The again door has been open this entire time.
Why the NHI explosion is totally different this time
Machine identities usually are not new. What modified is the speed. 5 years in the past, a typical enterprise software was a monolith speaking to a database. As we speak, that very same software is 50 microservices, every needing credentials to speak to the others. Each Kubernetes pod that spins up throughout auto-scaling creates workload identities. Each GitHub Actions workflow generates tokens. Each Terraform run provisions service principals. I watched a single deployment pipeline create extra machine identities in 20 minutes than our complete firm had human customers.
Then got here agentic AI, and the issue accelerated once more. These usually are not chatbots answering questions. They’re techniques authorised to execute instructions, transfer manufacturing knowledge, modify configurations and set off downstream workflows autonomously. Microsoft Copilot has entry to your SharePoint. GitHub Copilot can decide to your repos. The AI assistant your advertising and marketing workforce simply deployed can pull buyer data from Salesforce. One Id is predicting 2026 will see the primary main breach traced again to an over-privileged AI agent. The terrifying half? It is not going to appear like an assault. It’ll look precisely just like the system doing what it was designed to do.
