SpyCloud 2026 Identity Threat Report Finds Non-Human Identities Are Now The Leading Path Into The Enterprise

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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 organisations aren’t watching for them.

While 95% of organisations 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 organisations experienced an identity-based event in the same period, with those affected averaging eight events each.

Organisations 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 organisations 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 organisations detect, remediate, and govern identity threats across human and non-human identities.

Additional Key Findings 

• AI adoption has outpaced governance – Nearly all organisations (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 – Organisations 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 organisations 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 And Automation Separate The Most Resilient Identity Programmes

Identity exposure creates an ongoing operational burden that extends well beyond the initial incident and how quickly organisations respond has a direct impact on business outcomes. Those relying on manual, case-by-case remediation reported higher incident response costs than organisations 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 Optimised across identity exposure visibility, monitoring, governance, automation and remediation. The findings reflect that the more mature an identity programme 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 organisation’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 programmes are still measured on whether an exposure happened. That’s the wrong scoreboard,” said Damon Fleury, Chief Product Officer at SpyCloud. “Organisations 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.”

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