{"id":106652,"date":"2026-08-04T11:08:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/?p=106652"},"modified":"2026-08-04T11:08:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:08:51","slug":"75-of-attacks-tied-to-identity-security-gaps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/75-of-attacks-tied-to-identity-security-gaps\/","title":{"rendered":"75% of Attacks Tied to Identity Security Gaps"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/?s=Beyondtrust\">BeyondTrust<\/a> has published new research showing that identity security failures now sit at the center of most cyberattacks. The company&#8217;s Phantom Labs\u00ae division released its first <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondtrust.com\/blog\/entry\/phantom-labs-research-index\">Research Index<\/a> on August 4, 2026. The report is based on more than 400 offensive security research projects conducted over the past year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to the findings, 75% of completed investigations involved identity or privilege issues in some form. Attackers, the report notes, are increasingly exploiting trusted relationships between users, applications, machine identities, and AI agents. As a result, they rely less on isolated software flaws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Six root causes accounted for more than half of all issues found. These include credential and secret exposure at 18%, identity relationships and graph exposure at 11%, excessive or standing privilege at 11%, identity misconfiguration at 10%, and lateral movement at 6%. Notably, these problems rarely appeared alone. Standing privilege and privilege escalation showed up together most often. Meanwhile, credential exposure was the issue most likely to compound with other risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jonathan Johnson, Sr Manager of Research at BeyondTrust, explained the shift. As organizations connect human, machine, and AI agent identities across dispersed environments, he said, attackers no longer need to find a new vulnerability. Instead, they look for the next identity relationship that leads to privileged access. He added that pinpointing where those relationships create real exposure has become one of the harder problems in enterprise security today. Overall, three out of four research projects traced back to identity or privilege in some form, with standing privilege and privilege escalation emerging as the most common combination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>AI and LLM security was Phantom Labs&#8217; single largest research focus in its first year, making up half of all projects. This work covered cloud AI platforms at 58%, AI agents and agentic systems at 42%, model and data security at 12%, prompt injection and jailbreak techniques at 9%, and AI-specific privilege escalation at 6%. Many projects touched more than one category. As organizations deploy AI agents across cloud, SaaS, and internal workflows, these agents increasingly authenticate to systems, invoke tools, access data, and inherit permissions much like any other enterprise identity. However, they often do so with far less oversight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition to identity relationship mapping, Phantom Labs conducted original vulnerability research that led to coordinated disclosures across AI platforms. These included findings in OpenAI Codex and AWS Bedrock AgentCore. The disclosures show that even the newest AI ecosystems continue to inherit foundational assumptions around identity, privilege, and trust. Furthermore, this pattern wasn&#8217;t limited to AI systems alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Across all research conducted in the first year, certain platforms surfaced repeatedly. AWS was mentioned 85 times, followed by Microsoft Entra ID\/Azure at 57, GitHub at 40, Okta at 33, and Salesforce at 33. This recurrence suggests that the same identity assumptions run through cloud, identity-provider, DevOps, and SaaS ecosystems alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ultimately, Phantom Labs&#8217; research has shaped BeyondTrust&#8217;s product portfolio directly. Findings have fed into Identity Security Insights\u00ae, published research, and coordinated vulnerability disclosures. Through this work, BeyondTrust aims to turn offensive research into practical protections. The goal, the company says, is to help defenders act before privileges are exploited. As identity security challenges continue to grow more complex, BeyondTrust&#8217;s research signals that closing identity and privilege gaps will remain central to enterprise defense strategies going forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BeyondTrust has published new research showing that identity security failures [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":106653,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1595,9621],"tags":[314],"contributor":[9732],"class_list":["post-106652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","category-emerging-technologies","tag-cybersecurity-2","contributor-news-desk"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/BeyondTrust.jpg.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Rabab","author_link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/author\/rabab\/"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106654,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106652\/revisions\/106654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106652"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=106652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}