Survey Shines Spotlight on Risks Created by Identity Blind Spots
A survey of 312 senior security and IT leaders from organizations that have more than 500 employees, published today, finds nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) said they have a complete, real-time picture of identity risk across their environment but only 43% said they could assess the full blast radius of a compromised, high-privilege account within minutes.
Conducted by the market research firm Centiment on behalf of Axiad, a provider of an identity visibility and intelligence platform, the survey finds that nearly half of respondents (49%) are dependent to one degree or another on manual processes to determine the blast radius of an attack.
More challenging still, 41% of respondents admit they have no defensible, methodology-backed dollar estimate of their identity risk exposure, with 34% noting existing tools surface issues but lack the context to prioritize them according to business impact.
Even though 65% said they have insights into risk exposure, the survey also finds that 94% plan to make having a financially quantified view of identity risk posture in the next 12 months either a top (51%) or high priority (43%).
Axiad CEO David Canellos said the survey makes it apparent that when it comes to managing identities, there are significant blind spots that make it difficult for cybersecurity teams to defend their organizations effectively.
In fact, the lack of visibility is one of the primary reasons so many attacks that involve compromised identities have been so successful, he added.
Overall, the survey finds well more than a third of respondents (38%) reported experiencing an identity-related security incident with a measurable financial or operational impact. An additional 39% reported narrowly avoiding an incident but said remediation required significant unplanned resources to contain.
Top barriers to reducing that gap include complexity of managing credentials across heterogeneous environments (27%) and fragmented platforms (24%) spanning, for example, identity access management (IAM), privileged access management (PAM) and authentication protocols.
A full 85% also said they are concerned that AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery is outpacing their organizations’ ability to prioritize and respond, with more than half (51%) either very (34%) or extremely concerned (17%), the survey finds.
Of course, managing and securing identities is only going to become more complex in the agentic AI era. Many of those AI agents present rich targets through which cybercriminals can compromise entire workflows. In other instances, cybercriminals will likely attempt to insert malicious AI agents of their own into a workflow. Unless cybersecurity teams have some means of enforcing policies based on identity, it may be only a matter of time before there is a major incident.
On the plus side, the rise of AI agents also creates an opportunity for cybersecurity teams to justify investments in security platforms that should be able to address identity issues that, for one reason or another, have not been adequately addressed by legacy tools and platforms.
Hopefully, whatever level of disruption that might be caused by AI agents will be kept to a minimum but, as always, cybersecurity teams while continuing to remain optimistic would be well-advised to prepare for the worst.
