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Permiso Security’s third annual State of Identity Security 2026 report reveals that identity-related attacks dominated as the leading threat vector in 2025, with 76% of organizations reporting they accounted for up to 50% of security incidents and the remainder citing more than half.
Quick Intel
Permiso Security released its State of Identity Security 2026 report, based on a global survey of 512 organizations. The findings highlight that identity-related attacks—where adversaries exploit compromised credentials from employees, former staff, vendors, or non-human entities—emerged as the dominant cybersecurity threat vector in 2025. These attacks bypass traditional perimeter defenses by using legitimate login pathways.
76% of respondents indicated that identity-related incidents comprised up to 50% of their total security events, while the remaining organizations reported identity issues accounting for more than half.
The report identifies significant deficiencies in identity security practices. Only 46% of organizations maintain comprehensive visibility across all identities in their environments, hindering effective threat hunting and response. Even fewer—43%—possess the capability to detect identity-based risks before an incident unfolds, meaning proactive prevention remains elusive for most.
Response times also lag: just 29% of organizations can determine the blast radius of an identity compromise within minutes, while the majority require hours or days. This delay allows attackers to move laterally and exfiltrate data.
SaaS environments and third-party vendors represent particularly weak areas, with visibility poorest in cloud-based applications and vendor access ranking as a rapidly rising risk after employee credentials.
The explosive growth of AI systems introduces unprecedented challenges. 95% of organizations report that AI can now create or modify identities without traditional human oversight, dramatically increasing the number of non-human identities and expanding the potential attack surface.
Nearly four in ten respondents indicated that AI systems have access to 26% to 50% of their sensitive data—customer records, financial information, and proprietary trade secrets—often operating beyond conventional security monitoring. While organizations express confidence in tracking non-human identities, the report suggests this reflects “false confidence,” as behavioral monitoring and data access visibility remain limited.
“Organizations are deploying AI systems faster than they can secure them, granting access faster than they can track it, and generating identities faster than they can manage them,” said Paul Nguyen, Co-CEO of Permiso Security. “Most organizations don't have visibility into which AI systems have access, what permissions they hold, or what they're doing with the data they can access. These are non-human identities on steroids, with access patterns that traditional monitoring can't detect.”
Fragmented tooling exacerbates these issues: three-quarters of organizations use between 3 and 10 separate solutions for identity visibility alone, leading to correlation delays and blind spots. Over 70% believe improved visibility could have prevented 26% to 75% of past incidents, and nearly 90% plan to increase identity security investments in 2026.
Respondents prioritized real-time threat detection and unified cross-platform visibility over additional point solutions, underscoring the need for consolidated approaches.
“The gap between what organizations believe they can see and what they actually control has never been wider,” said Jason Martin, Co-CEO at Permiso Security. “Organizations keep asking us for faster threat detection. But when we dig into what's slowing them down, it's always the same answer: fragmented visibility.”
About Permiso
Permiso is the leading cloud identity security platform that helps organizations discover, protect, and defend against identity threats across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. The company's innovative approach combines static configuration data with runtime intelligence to provide comprehensive visibility into human identities, non-human identities, vendor accounts, and now AI identities. Trusted by multiple Fortune 500 companies and some of the Las Vegas Strip's premier resorts and casinos, Permiso enables organizations to secure their identity fabric across the full spectrum of modern computing environments.
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