Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If you’re a security vendor and you get breached, you’re not just another victim; you’re a failed promise. A broken fire alarm in a burning building. When Okta disclosed a breach in October 2023, its stock dropped nearly 11%, wiping out close to $2 billion in market cap in a single day – a stark reminder of how quickly trust evaporates.

You can’t secure what you don’t manage. Mismanaged access is an open invitation for breaches. Overprivileged users and a surge in non-human identities (like service accounts and API keys) are quietly expanding your organization’s attack surface. Yet many still rely on outdated, manual IAM practices that can’t keep up with modern infrastructure. It’s not just a theory—38% of breaches trace back to stolen credentials.

“Identity is the new perimeter” had its moment. But as cloud-native environments and distributed teams become the norm, this mantra is starting to show its age. The risks tied to static, identity-based access are now too big to ignore, and no one sees that more clearly than security vendors themselves.

DevOps teams are moving faster than ever deploying AI agents, orchestrating automated workflows, and scaling infrastructure across cloud platforms. But as speed increases, so does the attack surface. Traditional access models weren’t built for today’s dynamic, machine-heavy environments, and static privileges have become one of the biggest security liabilities in SaaS.

SSH keys may be the riskiest credentials you’re not thinking about. In today’s DevOps pipelines, GitLab SSH keys silently facilitate critical operations—from pushing code to deploying infrastructure. Just because GitLab SSH keys are unassuming doesn’t mean you should ignore them. Unlike passwords, SSH keys don’t trigger alerts when reused, leaked, or silently exploited. Unfortunately, attackers know this, too. 88% of all web application attacks involved stolen credentials.

Machine identities have quietly become the backbone of digital infrastructure, outnumbering human users in most enterprise environments. While they don’t forget passwords or call tech support, they do introduce a unique set of security and operational risks. Unlike human users, machine identities (like service accounts, API keys, bots, and microservices) often operate with highly permissive access rights and weak or nonexistent authorization policies.

As the software world shifted toward microservices and distributed architectures, the volume and complexity of API traffic have skyrocketed. Unfortunately, so has the number of API-related breaches and cyber attacks. Last year, nearly 44% of all advanced bot traffic online targeted API endpoints, while traditional web applications received just 10% of the malicious traffic. It’s no surprise that 57% of organizations admit to having suffered API-related breaches in the past two years.

Often overlooked, identities are prime targets for bad actors. In December 2024, a compromised API key in the BeyondTrust Remote Support SaaS environment was enough to cause a privilege escalation attack. The year before, Microsoft hit the headlines as an SAS token leak exposed over 38TB of sensitive data. The good news is that simplifying user access and eliminating security risks from standing privileges has never been more achievable thanks to the right identity lifecycle management (ILM) tools.

Security breaches are increasingly expensive and harder to spot, extending beyond common attacks like phishing. Attackers are now targeting the least visible parts of your infrastructure: non-human identities (NHIs). NHIs outnumber human identities by 45:1 in cloud environments—these include service accounts, APIs, applications, and bots that interact with systems and access sensitive data.

With this release, Apono provides customers a unified cloud access solution that delivers automated, Just-in-Time, Just Enough access for every identity—whether person or machine.