Every Entity That Can Authenticate Is an Identity. It’s Time Security Treated It That Way.

Security has spent years defining identity too narrowly. In MixMode’s latest threat research report, Every Entity That Can Authenticate Is an Identity. It’s Time Security Treated It That Way, that assumption is challenged head-on.

The reality inside modern environments is far more complex: machine accounts, service accounts, API keys, and AI agents now vastly outnumber human users, and they’re all authenticating, acting, and creating risk.

The report highlights a clear turning point coming out of RSA Conference 2026, where identity became one of the most urgent topics in cybersecurity. Organizations are no longer just managing users. They are managing an explosion of non-human identities, many of which operate continuously in the background with little to no visibility. These entities don’t follow traditional lifecycle models, yet they hold access, execute actions, and can be leveraged in attacks just as easily, if not more so, than human credentials.

At the same time, the threat landscape has evolved. The majority of modern attacks are now malware-free, relying instead on credential abuse, token manipulation, and trusted identity chains.

From the perspective of traditional IAM tools, everything can appear valid and authorized, even as an attacker moves laterally through an environment. That’s the gap the report calls out: security teams are verifying identity, but not truly understanding behavior.

The shift is simple, but significant. Identity is no longer just who or what an entity is. It’s defined by what that entity does. And without continuous visibility into the behavior of every authenticating entity across the network, critical threats remain invisible.

Download the full report to explore how this expanded definition of identity is reshaping security strategy and what organizations must do to detect and stop threats that operate within the bounds of “normal.”