For decades, enterprise identity security was built around people. Employees logged in. Administrators received privileges. Contractors were provisioned and eventually removed. That model is changing fast.
AI agents, bots, service accounts and other machine identities can authenticate to applications, call APIs, access data and take actions on behalf of people or businesses.
If a machine can authenticate and receive permission to act, it has an identity that needs to be secured.
And enterprises are about to have a lot more of them. Gartner identifies human and machine identities as a rapidly expanding attack surface and points to AI agents as a major force changing how enterprises need to think about identity and access.
The security question is no longer only:
Who is this user?
It is increasingly:
What is this machine, what can it access, and what is it doing right now?
AI agents need credentials, permissions and trust
- What should it be allowed to access?
- How much privilege should it receive?
- How long should those permissions exist?
- What happens if its credentials are compromised?
An authorized machine can still become a threat
- Imagine an AI agent has legitimate permission to access ten applications.
- Today it behaves normally.
- Tomorrow it begins querying data it has never accessed before, communicating with unusual systems or taking actions outside its expected workflow.
- Its credentials are still valid.
- Its permissions may still be valid.
This is why identity security increasingly requires continuous detection as well as access control.
Gartner’s 2026 ITDR research makes this distinction clear: preventative IAM controls are critical, but organizations also need detection and response capabilities capable of identifying active identity-based attacks.
For machine identities, that requirement becomes even more important. Machines operate continuously, at speed and increasingly across cloud, SaaS, API and application environments.
Security teams need to understand not simply whether a machine was authorized, but whether its activity still deserves trust.
That's where Stellar Cyber changes the equation
Stellar Cyber brings identity signals into the same security operations environment as network, endpoint, cloud and other telemetry.
- That matters because an identity anomaly rarely tells the entire story.
- A suspicious login is useful.
- A suspicious identity connected to an unusual host, unexpected network communication, abnormal process activity and other security alerts is much more valuable.
Stellar Cyber’s behavioral analytics can detect identity-related anomalies such as unusual login locations, Impossible Travel, abnormal login times and unexpected asset access.
Case Analysis then helps analysts connect users and identities to hosts, processes, services, URLs and other entities involved in an attack.
And integrations such as Microsoft Entra ID can add identity context to investigations and enable response actions, including revoking sessions or disabling compromised users when properly configured.
The differentiator is not simply identity detection.
It is connecting identity to the complete attack story.
Identity security is becoming machine security
The rise of AI means enterprises are moving toward a world populated by both human and machine identities. Both receive trust. Both receive access. And both can be compromised or abused.
That makes identity security a must-have component of modern security operations.
IAM establishes what an identity should be allowed to do.
ITDR helps determine whether that identity is behaving as expected.
And Stellar Cyber helps security teams see those identity signals alongside everything else happening across the environment. Because your next compromised identity may not belong to a person at all.
It may belong to a machine.
References
- Gartner, 2026 Predicts: Identity and Access Management, 22 January 2026, ID G00841403.
- Gartner, Implement ITDR Practice to Combat Identity-Based Attacks, 5 March 2026, ID G00845676.
- Stellar Cyber Knowledge Base, Microsoft Entra ID Connector, Stellar Cyber 6.6.
- Stellar Cyber Knowledge Base, Machine Learning Detections / User Behavior Analytics, Stellar Cyber.
- Stellar Cyber Knowledge Base, Case Analysis, Stellar Cyber 6.6.
- Stellar Cyber Knowledge Base, Stellar Cyber 6.6 Release Notes.
