All news with #identity security tag

🔒 Orphan accounts — abandoned human, service, and AI‑agent identities — create persistent, unseen access across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles. These dormant accounts often evade traditional IAM and IGA tools due to integration gaps, unclear ownership, and proliferation of non‑human identities. Continuous identity audit using application telemetry and a unified audit trail can detect, flag, and automatically remediate or decommission orphaned accounts. Orchid positions its Identity Audit as connective evidence to inform IAM decisions.

🔒 Modern security must treat identity as the perimeter rather than the network. As remote work and cloud adoption dissolved traditional edges, attackers increasingly target credentials — a trend underscored by reports from Verizon, Microsoft and Okta — making identity the primary attack surface. Organizations must adopt Zero Trust identity controls such as MFA, SSO, RBAC, PAM, device trust and continuous, adaptive monitoring, and treat identity lifecycle and privilege management as core infrastructure.

🔒 As CISOs prepare for 2026, seven pragmatic projects can strengthen defenses against evolving threats. Priorities include transforming identity and access to cover human and non-human agents and reinforcing email security. Organizations should leverage AI for vulnerability discovery and security automation, enforce enterprise AI governance, adopt a zero-trust-by-default posture, and unify data governance to reduce shadow data and compliance gaps.

🔒 In conversations with Southeast Asia CISOs, leaders forecast 2026 as a year when AI and cloud become prime attack surfaces, forcing a shift from perimeter defenses to identity- and resilience-centered strategies. They emphasize hardening cloud and AI infrastructure, treating identity as the active perimeter, instrumenting browsers and agents for forensic clarity, and operationalizing resilience both as capability and — in some financial institutions — as a product. Supply‑chain fragility, agentic AI autonomy, session hijacking, and IT‑OT convergence are highlighted as priority risks demanding continuous verification, scoped agent controls, and stronger vendor governance.

🔐 Australia's 2026 law banning under-16s from social media has reignited debate over whether internet services should require identity verification. Tony Anscombe argues that distinguishing verified and unverified users could reduce abuse, targeted fraud and underage exposure while letting people filter unwanted content. He warns verification methods (biometrics, government ID) carry privacy and data-retention risks and that bans may drive minors to circumvent restrictions, so a balanced regulatory approach is needed.

🔐 CrowdStrike will acquire identity security startup SGNL for $740 million to add real-time, risk-aware authorization that grants or revokes access based on current signals rather than static permissions. The deal, expected to close in CrowdStrike’s fiscal Q1 ending April 30, will be paid mostly in cash with some stock subject to vesting. SGNL’s technology layers with existing identity systems from Okta, Microsoft, and AWS, evaluating contextual signals — user behavior, device posture, and threat intelligence — to enforce continuous authorization and address rising machine-identity and AI-agent risks.

🔐 Jamie Norton, CISO at ASIC and vice chair of ISACA, describes persistent cyber challenges across government and financial sectors. He points to legacy systems, weak foundational hygiene, and the need to align people, process and technology while warning that rapid advances in AI will change roles and tooling. Norton emphasizes executive accountability, mentorship, training and a mission-driven culture to retain talent, and champions the mantra Do the basics brilliantly.

🔐 Microsoft will require MFA for all users signing into the Microsoft 365 admin center and will block accounts that do not have MFA enabled starting February 9, 2026. The enforcement covers portal.office.com/adminportal/home, admin.cloud.microsoft, and admin.microsoft.com and follows an initial rollout that began in February 2025. Administrators are urged to enable MFA using Microsoft's setup wizard or official documentation to avoid service interruptions; Microsoft notes that MFA significantly reduces the risk of account compromise.

🔒 CrowdStrike announced an agreement to acquire SGNL to enhance identity-first security across its Falcon platform. The acquisition will integrate SGNL into Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security, providing continuous, context-aware authorization for human, non-human, and AI agent identities. SGNL’s runtime enforcement layer will ingest Falcon risk signals and centralize telemetry to enable just-in-time access, replacing standing privileges with dynamic, risk-aware permissions to reduce the identity attack surface.

🔍 Identity has fragmented across SaaS, on‑prem, IaaS, PaaS and unmanaged apps, creating an invisible mass of ungoverned accounts and non‑human identities the author calls identity dark matter. Traditional IAM and IGA address only the nearly managed half of this universe, while APIs, bots, service accounts and agent‑AI remain unobserved and ungoverned. Orchid Security recommends shifting from configuration‑based controls to Identity Observability: collect telemetry from every application, unify audit trails, and extend governance across managed, unmanaged, and agent‑AI identities to achieve measurable visibility and faster response.

🔐Agentic AI introduces a new class of identity that behaves with humanlike intent yet scales and persists like machines. Traditional IAM and PAM were designed for employees and predictable workloads; AI agents are decentralized, easy to create, cross‑platform, and often granted broad privileges, creating serious blind spots. CISOs should apply lifecycle management: assign clear ownership tied to the identity provider, define explicit measurable purpose and scope, enforce least privilege, maintain continuous visibility to detect privilege drift, and automate revocation when agents go idle.

🔒 As AI hype settles, CISOs are refocusing 2026 priorities on resilience, rapid detection, and measurable outcomes. They favor engineering-driven architecture for cloud stability, AI-enabled orchestration to cut dwell time, and broad identity and privilege governance for human and non-human accounts. Visibility and SaaS discovery will curb shadow AI use, while security baked into agentic AI and post-quantum preparedness (cryptographic inventories and vendor roadmaps) become essential. Turning security into a visible trust signal and linking spend to ROI rounds out the agenda.

🔐 Federated Identity Management (FIM) enables a single authentication to span multiple applications or organizations, letting users sign in once and reuse identity assertions across services. It improves user experience and resilience while introducing architectural complexity, potential vendor lock-in, and additional service costs. Implementations commonly rely on cloud identity providers such as Google, Microsoft, or Okta and use protocols like SAML, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect.

🔒 Many enterprise CISOs continue to struggle to abandon passwords despite decades of effort and mounting security risks. RSA’s ID IQ Report 2026, based on a survey of 2,000 security professionals, finds that 90% of respondents report problems with passwordless deployments. Technical complexity across hybrid environments, legacy systems, OT/IoT devices, and inconsistent platform support creates gaps that often force organizations to retain insecure fallbacks. Experts recommend sequencing rollouts to secure privileged users first, using reverse proxies or VPN-enforced SSO for legacy apps, and ensuring end-to-end phishing-resistant enrollment and recovery.

🔒 Many enterprises are racing to deploy autonomous agentic AI without establishing robust identity and authentication controls, creating an identity crisis for CISOs. Experts warn that fewer than 5–10% of organizations assign formal agent identities (for example via PKI) before wider release, leaving deployments vulnerable to hijacking and prompt-injection. Because agents routinely communicate with one another, a compromised agent can cascade malicious instructions across legitimate agents before revocation, and current vendor solutions and kill switches are incomplete or absent.

🔒 AWS Wickr now provides a suite of admin APIs that let administrators programmatically manage secure communication networks at scale. The APIs automate critical workflows — including user lifecycle management, network creation and deletion, retention and federation policy pushes, and security group placement based on directory attributes — and integrate with identity systems, policy frameworks, and automation pipelines. They are available today in all supported AWS regions, including AWS GovCloud (US-West), via AWS SDKs, the AWS CLI, or direct REST calls.

🔐 The EU's NIS2 Directive requires organizations in critical sectors to strengthen identity and access controls, with Article 21 explicitly calling for access policies and practical protections. Modern password hygiene favours long passphrases (e.g., 15+ characters), breach screening, and avoiding routine rotations unless compromise is suspected, alongside user-friendly measures like password managers. While NIS2 doesn't always explicitly mandate MFA, national guidance and ENISA expect phishing‑resistant MFA for privileged and critical accounts.

🔐 The article introduces Access Fabric as a unified, adaptive approach that links identity, device, and network signals to make real-time, risk-based access decisions throughout every session. It warns that fragmented identity and network tools create visibility gaps that AI-empowered attackers can exploit. By being contextual, connected, and continuous, an Access Fabric closes seams, reduces complexity, and enforces consistent policies for users, devices, and AI agents.

🔒 Sponsored content from Token presents wireless biometric passwordless authentication as a way to transform MFA from a persistent cost center into a measurable productivity gain. By replacing passwords and authenticator apps with proximity-bound biometric hardware such as Token Ring and Token BioStick, Token says average login time falls from 22 seconds to 2 seconds. The vendor asserts this yields roughly $1,466.67 per employee per year in recovered productivity while also reducing password resets and blocking phishing, session relay, and social-engineering attacks.

🔔 AWS has expanded IAM Identity Center to 37 AWS Regions with official availability in Asia Pacific (Taipei). The service is the recommended way to manage workforce access, offering single sign-on, centralized multi-account access, and integration with existing identity sources. It powers personalized experiences in AWS applications such as Amazon Q and supports user-aware data access controls for services like Amazon Redshift. IAM Identity Center is available at no additional cost in supported regions.