This year’s Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) didn’t just highlight ransomware or zero-day exploits—it spotlighted what’s enabling these attacks: third-party exposure and machine Identity Security abuse. These two silent but critical threats are now central to many of today’s most devastating breaches.
According to the 2025 DBIR, data breaches involving third parties have doubled, rising from 15% to 30% year over year. Simultaneously, threat actors are increasingly targeting machine credentials and overlooked machine accounts to infiltrate systems, escalate privileges, and steal sensitive data.
Modern enterprises rely heavily on contractors, vendors, service providers, and business partners to remain agile and competitive. But this web of relationships creates an expansive and often unmanaged identity footprint. These third-party users can become easy entry points for attackers if their access is not properly governed.
Many of these breaches originate from weak lifecycle management—for example, a contractor account that remains active after a project concludes or a vendor with over-privileged access. The DBIR warns that these incidents are not isolated to one industry. Healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and the public sector have all suffered major breaches due to third-party exposure.
To mitigate these threats, companies must treat third-party identities with the same rigor as internal users. That means implementing strong visibility, access controls, and deprovisioning processes.
The Machine Identity Problem Is Escalating
Machine identities—including service accounts, bots, APIs, AI agents, and robotic process automation (RPA)—now outnumber human identities in most organizations. But while their use is skyrocketing, oversight is lagging behind. These machine accounts often lack clear ownership, governance, and security, making them prime targets for threat actors.
Credential-based attacks remain a top method of initial access, with attackers increasingly abusing machine accounts to move through networks undetected. The 2025 DBIR links unprotected machine identities to several high-impact breaches, including ransomware campaigns.
Most identity and access management (IAM) solutions are still built around human-centric models, leaving machine identities poorly protected. Organizations need to adopt scalable, automated identity security approaches that treat machine accounts as first-class citizens. For more insights, refer to SailPoint’s whitepaper, “Who’s Watching the Machines?”
A Unified Strategy Is No Longer Optional
Maintaining separate identity systems for employees, third parties, and machines is a dangerous practice. This fragmented approach leaves exploitable gaps across the enterprise. Attackers don’t need to break into every system—they just need to find one weak link.
Breaches driven by third-party and machine identities are increasing at a faster rate than those involving internal users. This shift underscores the need for a unified identity security strategy. In today’s threat landscape, identity is identity—regardless of whether it belongs to a person, a contractor, or a bot.
The solution? A consolidated, enterprise-wide identity governance framework that covers every type of user. SailPoint delivers this through the SailPoint Atlas platform, enabling organizations to manage and secure all identities—human and machine—at scale.
Close the Identity Gap Before Attackers Exploit It
As identity ecosystems grow more complex, the line between human and machine continues to blur. Traditional IAM approaches, built for a different era, can no longer keep up.
Forward-thinking organizations must adapt by unifying identity governance across all user types. SailPoint empowers enterprises to do exactly that—turning identity chaos into clarity, and protecting critical assets in a rapidly evolving digital world.
