Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

AI is rewriting the rules of privileged access, but the rise of AI agents is creating a governance crisis. Threats like credential stuffing and privilege escalation are now accelerated by autonomous systems moving faster than humans can react. 82% of companies deploy autonomous AI agents, but 23% of IT teams admit those bots have already been tricked into revealing credentials—and fewer than half have guardrails in place. In modern infrastructure, machine identities now outnumber humans 80:1.

Identity is now the most common entry point for attackers. In cloud-native environments, thousands of microservices, containers, and agents request credentials every day, and each one represents a potential weakness. The imbalance between human and non-human identities (NHIs) is growing, but many organizations still devote the bulk of their identity and access governance (IGA) efforts to the former.

New details are emerging in recent weeks on how the Crimson Collective threat group has been conducting a large-scale campaign targeting Amazon Web Services cloud environments. Recent reports highlight how easily the attackers progressed once they obtained valid credentials. The Crimson Collective claims to have exfiltrated ~570 GB across ~28,000 internal GitLab projects; Red Hat has confirmed access to a Consulting GitLab instance but hasn’t verified the full scope of those claims.

Imagine autonomous agents negotiating and acting on your behalf—no manual hand-offs, just an efficient, policy‑driven communication. That’s the promise of Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, unveiled at Google Cloud Next in April 2025. Developed with input from over 50 partners, A2A is now open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and governed by the Linux Foundation.