Every identity has value. The question is: to whom?

Think about the service account your team set up three years ago for an integration that barely anyone uses anymore. Low risk, right? Minimal permissions. Probably not on anyone’s radar.

Now think about what that account can reach. Maybe it has access to a cloud storage bucket. That bucket is connected to an application. That application shares a trust relationship with a system that holds customer records. The account itself isn’t the prize. But to an attacker, it’s an open door—and doors are exactly what they’re looking for.

An identity is more than a login

Every identity in your environment represents something attackers want: trusted access. Not just a username and password, but a collection of permissions, relationships and trust connections built up over time across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, infrastructure and business-critical systems.

In many organizations, identities have become the new security perimeter. And unlike a firewall, most organizations can’t fully see what’s behind theirs.

When an attacker gains control of an identity, they don’t just get an account. They inherit the trust associated with it. They can operate as a legitimate user, bypass controls designed to stop external threats and move through an environment in ways that look completely normal. That’s what makes identity-based attacks so difficult to detect—and so effective.

The account that looks low risk rarely is

The identities that concern security teams most are often the obvious ones: admin accounts, privileged users, accounts tied to sensitive systems. But attackers think differently. They’re not just looking for high-value accounts. They’re looking for any account that connects to one.

An account that appears low risk may be indirectly linked to administrative roles, sensitive data stores or critical business applications through relationships no one mapped and no traditional tool surfaced. Attackers actively search for these hidden pathways and use them to move laterally, gain additional access and escalate privileges until they reach their actual target.

The identity itself is rarely the final objective. It’s the key that opens the next door.

You can’t protect what you can’t see. Discover every identity. Understand every risk. Reduce your attack surface.

The scale of the problem is bigger than most teams realize

There are now roughly 10 times more machine identities in a typical environment than human ones. Bots, workflows, automation tools and AI systems all require access—and that access accumulates just like any other identity’s does. Meanwhile, 75% of organizations report having excessive permissions across their environment, meaning most identities carry more access than they actually need.

Add forgotten accounts, inactive users, unmanaged service accounts and third-party access to that picture, and the identity attack surface becomes very large very fast. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 35% of data breaches involved shadow data—information that exists in places security teams didn’t know to look.

The common thread in all of it: visibility gaps. Attackers find what defenders can’t see.

What it means to actually understand identity risk

For security leaders, the question is no longer just who has access. It’s what a compromised identity could reach, what privileges it could inherit, what data it could expose and how far an attacker could travel using it as a starting point.

That requires seeing how identities connect—not just individually, but as a network of relationships and trust paths that span the entire environment. When you understand those connections, you can identify where the real risk lives, prioritize what to address first and reduce the attack surface before an incident forces the issue.

A single compromised account can become the starting point for data theft, ransomware, operational disruption or long-term persistence. The organizations that reduce that risk are the ones that mapped their exposure before an attacker did.