The Non-Human Identity Explosion: Why Security Teams Must Rethink Trust

This guest article was contributed by Alix Melchy, VP of AI at Jumio

In modern enterprise environments, the users you fear most gaining access to your systems may not be people at all. From autonomous bots to AI agents and machine-generated tokens, non-human identities (NHIs) are becoming embedded across enterprise operations. Agentic AI is seeing explosive growth, with 79% of organizations already adopting it and the market set to hit over $199 billion by 2034.

These machine identities offer enormous upside, including speed, scalability, and around-the-clock availability. However, they also open a new, largely unsecured front in the cybersecurity war. Without effective identity intelligence, NHIs introduce serious risks to the enterprise: they can be exploited by attackers, misconfigured by developers, or turned malicious through hijacking.

It’s no longer just about who is accessing your systems. It’s also about what.

NHIs: The Unseen Expansion of Your Threat Surface

Traditional cybersecurity architecture has been built around verifying and protecting human users like employees, partners, and customers. But that paradigm is shifting. Modern enterprises can easily have thousands of NHIs performing tasks from accessing APIs and querying databases to executing machine learning operations.

What makes this a risk is not the volume of NHIs, but how they’re managed: many operate continuously with elevated privileges. Yet they lack the oversight and identity governance applied to their human counterparts. They often escape key safeguards like credential rotation, access reviews, and behavioral monitoring. This makes them prime targets for attackers seeking persistence and stealth.

Worse, AI itself has made exploiting NHIs easier. Fraudsters now use generative AI tools to spin up convincing synthetic identities, automate credential stuffing, and create deepfakes to bypass legacy defenses. The barrier to launching industrialized, AI-powered fraud has never been lower. With a few prompts and a fake ID, bad actors can automate attacks at scale.

It’s Time to Treat NHIs Like First-Class Citizens

Since NHIs are here to stay, it’s time to apply the same discipline to their identity management as we do for human users. Here’s what that looks like:

• Strong Authentication for NHIs: Machine-to-machine credentials should be cryptographically signed, bound to specific actions, and automatically rotated. Just like users need MFA, NHIs need robust identity assurance.

• Lifecycle Management: Every NHI should be traceable from creation to decommissioning. Assign clear ownership, monitor behavior, and enforce role-based access controls to limit exposure.

• Real-Time Risk Scoring: Static identity checks are insufficient. Enterprises must evaluate machine behavior dynamically, using AI-powered risk signals that consider environmental context, behavioral anomalies, and velocity patterns.

  
  

Fighting Fire with Fire: Identity Intelligence Against AI-Powered Fraud

Just as cybercriminals are using NHIs to amplify their attacks, defenders must adopt AI to stay ahead. These systems are fast, scalable, and increasingly able to mimic legitimate behavior, which means point-in-time defenses often fail.

To combat this, organizations must implement identity intelligence strategies that analyze risk continuously and contextually:

• Velocity Monitoring: Catch suspicious behavior by detecting rapid, repetitive identity submissions or inconsistencies across sessions. These are patterns that often indicate synthetic or automated activity.

• Advanced Liveness Detection: Modern fraudsters now use AI-generated deepfakes to impersonate real users. Advanced liveness checks, which use motion, texture, and depth to spot nuances, are critical to detect and block these attacks.

• Cross-Transactional Risk Linking: Point solutions miss the bigger picture. Enterprises need the ability to connect risk signals across transactions, systems, and channels to uncover fraud rings and coordinated attacks before they escalate.

  
  

A New Chapter in Cybersecurity

The rise of NHIs marks a new chapter in enterprise cybersecurity: one where identity isn’t always human, but the risks are very real. In this new landscape, the question isn't just "Who are you?" but "What are you, and can you be trusted?"

Security teams must evolve their identity frameworks to handle both human and machine users with equal scrutiny. The most secure enterprises in this next era of AI will be those who see identity not as a static credential, but as a dynamic trust signal. One that is continuously evaluated, contextually aware, and resistant to manipulation.