Machine Identity: One Year Later — 109 Machines Per Human, 79 Are AI Agents

Remember Dave's service account from 2017? It's still there — and now it has 108 friends. 79 of them are AI agents nobody owns.
What you'll hear:
• The ratio grew — 45:1 became 80:1, 109:1, up to 144:1 in cloud-native shops (and why the spread is the story)
• The scariest stat — 64% of secrets leaked in 2022 were STILL live in January 2026
• 28.65M new secrets on public GitHub last year; AI coding assistants leak at 2x the baseline
• The breaches — ShinyHunters OAuth reuse (200+ orgs), Vercel, the npm worm; 3 NHI vendors acquired in 3 months
• The fix emerging — agent passports: Entra Agent ID, Okta for AI Agents, workload identity standards
• What works — inventory first (67% of NHIs are invisible to IAM), short-lived secrets, least privilege, human owners
— Andrés Sarmiento
#machineidentity #NHI #cybersecurity #IAM #secretsmanagement #identitysecurity #TechUpdates #infosec #AIagents #SecurityPlus