The most prominent part of this year’s Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) was not ransomware headlines or zero-day exploits. Quietly, but consistently, two underlying factors played a role in some of the worst violations. Third party exposure and machine qualification abuse.
According to the 2025 DBIR, third-party involvement in the breach doubled year-on-year, jumping from 15% to 30%. In parallel, attackers have increasingly exploited machine qualifications and unlimited machine accounts to gain access, escalate privileges and remove sensitive data.
The message is clear. It is no longer sufficient to protect employees on their own. To truly defend against modern threats, organizations must manage all human, non-employee, and machine identities within a unified security strategy.
Third-party risk: expand faster than your organization can control
Today’s Enterprise is a patchwork of partnerships, including contractors, vendors, business partners, managed service providers, and affiliates. These relationships promote efficiency, but also create a vast identity ecosystem. Without strong governance, third-party identities become ripe blind spots for exploitation.
Violations related to third-party access are often attributed to poor lifecycle management. For example, if the contractor account becomes active after the project is finished, or if the business partner logs in with excessive privileges. 2025 DBIR notes that this trend is accelerating and that healthcare, finance, manufacturing and the public sector are not limited to one industry that has reported major incidents caused by third-party exposure.
Organizations should extend identity governance to non-employees with the same rigor applied to internal staff, ensuring timely deactivation across the entire scope of vision, accountability and third-party users.
Machine Identity: Hidden Gatekeeper to Critical Systems
Human identity remains vulnerable, but mechanical identity is even faster risk. Service accounts, bots, RPAs, AI agents, APIs – digital labor – are often exploding numbers without clear ownership or oversight. As AI agents grow, they drive the growth and complexity of machine identity, even beyond what organizations manage today.
This year, DBIR, 2025, discovered that qualification-based attacks remain the top of the initial access method, increasingly targeting attackers unruled machine accounts due to intrusions. Unsecured machine accounts were linked to major violations and escalating ransomware attacks.
The interests are growing. However, most traditional identity security tools still treat machines like second-rate citizens. So it is essential to go beyond ad hoc machine management to a model built for scale and automation. To dig deeper into the issue, check out the white paper “Who is looking at the machine?”
A unified approach is no longer an option
Fragmented identity governance is no longer a weakness. That’s a responsibility. One silo employee, another third-party user, and the machine (if any, there is a crack that is wide enough for an attacker to pass through. They don’t have to violate everything. They only need one opening.
Violations tied to third-party users and machine accounts accelerate faster than those associated with internal employees. This is a clear warning sign that inconsistent governance is increasing new vulnerabilities. The reality is: Identity is identity. Human, non-employee, or machine, all identities must be properly managed, governed and protected under a unified strategy.
Organizations that survive the threat of tomorrow are not organizations that seek to harmonize solutions. They recognize that the only way to govern all identities together is the only way. Integrating identity security between employees, contractors, partners, service accounts, bots, and AI agents closes key gaps, increases visibility and, most importantly, enhanced defense.
SailPoint helps organizations ensure their full range of identity at an enterprise scale, with solutions designed for today’s complex enterprise environments. Whether you’re managing machine identity or protecting non-employee access, SailPoint offers a unified identity security experience that clearly changes identity chaos.
We explore why a new approach is needed to dig deeper into machine identity, and why traditional human-centered models are no longer sufficient – we explore what machine identity is (and why definitions are important), how machine identity has evolved along with human identity, and why traditional governance methods have failed in a machine-driven world.
The gap between human and machine identity security is growing. It’s time for the attacker to close it before it does it for you.
sauce:
Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR)
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