The Rise of Non-Human Identities: A New Cybersecurity Frontier

By Alix Melchy, VP of AI at Jumio

The line between humans and machines in digital spaces is blurring. Non-human identities (NHIs), including AI agents, bots, and machine-generated tokens, are rapidly becoming the new digital workforce. Currently, 35% of businesses have adopted NHIs, specifically AI agents, and over 70% plan to implement this tech in the near future.

But while these entities offer productivity and scalability, they also present a significant and growing threat to enterprise security both within and outside organizations’ perimeters. Deploying NHIs requires dedicated enhancements of the defense strategy to address associated new vulnerabilities. In parallel, NHIs also enhance fraudsters’ advanced attacks.

For instance, fraudsters are using NHIs like AI agents to generate convincing fraud schemes such as synthetic identity fraud and target human digital identities within the enterprise. Because AI agents lower the knowledge base to launch attacks, they’re expanding the pool of potential cybercriminals and broadening the threat landscape.

As fraud becomes more industrialized and AI more accessible, it’s time we rethink how we secure identity in a world where “who” isn’t always human.

The Expanding Threat Surface of NHIs

While we’ve seen enterprises advance their human identity intelligence tactics with biometric identification strategies including liveness detection and cross-transaction risk monitoring, the explosion of machine identities, used for everything from accessing APIs to deploying AI chatbots, has opened a vast and often unmonitored threat surface that enterprises cannot ignore.

These NHIs are often granted too broad access, run continuously, and undergo at best the same scrutiny or lifecycle management as human users. And that’s where the problem starts. Many enterprises have thousands of these entities operating in the background with elevated privileges, yet with minimal oversight. Without strong authentication, governance, and monitoring, NHIs become prime targets for attackers.

More concerning is that the barrier to entry for launching attacks using NHIs is rapidly decreasing. Fraudsters no longer need deep technical skills, as they now have access to AI-as-a-service tools that can generate synthetic identities, write malware, and even create convincing deepfake personas with little more than a prompt. This democratization of AI means anyone with a laptop and a credit card can automate fraud at scale.

Building the Future: Identity Intelligence for NHIs

To secure a future filled with non-human participants, we must extend the same rigor of identity proofing to NHIs as we do to humans. That means:

• Authentication Standards for NHIs: Just like humans require multi-factor authentication, NHIs should be provisioned with strong cryptographic credentials, regularly rotated keys, and very granular least privilege access policies with delegated identity representation as required.
• Lifecycle Governance: Enterprises need to treat NHIs as first-class identities, tracked from creation to decommissioning, with clear ownership, behavior monitoring, and granular role-based access controls, both in terms of scope and duration.
• Continuous Risk Assessment: Traditional one-time checks are no longer enough. There must be dynamic, AI-powered risk signals that evaluate behaviors, anomalies, and environmental factors in real time.

Identity Intelligence for NHI Attack Vectors:

Fraudsters are also leveraging NHIs like AI agents to execute high-volume, automated attacks that overwhelm systems and evade legacy defenses. To counter these threats, enterprises need multilayered, intelligence-driven defense mechanisms capable of identifying risk beyond a single transaction or device:

• Velocity Patterns: Security strategies must evolve to rapidly and accurately detect behavioral anomalies. Patterns like repeated identity submissions from a single device or inconsistencies across onboarding sessions can reveal synthetic or automated activity, even when each individual interaction seems legitimate.
• Advanced Liveness Detection: With generative AI lowering the knowledge barrier to creating realistic fraud like deepfakes, traditional identity verification tools are no longer sufficient. Modern liveness detection must go beyond static image analysis, using motion, depth, and texture cues to distinguish real users from AI-generated imposters.
• Cross-Transactional Risk Assessment: To effectively counter the rise of NHIs, organizations need the ability to link risk signals across multiple systems and user sessions. By analyzing how identities, devices, and behaviors interact across the digital ecosystem, businesses can identify and disrupt fraud patterns before they scale.

A New Era of Cyber Defense

NHIs, whether helpful AI agents or malicious bots, are reshaping the landscape of fraud, cybersecurity, and compliance. Enterprises must now be cautious of the threats this tech brings within and outside their perimeter.

The future of cybersecurity lies in identity intelligence. And in a world filled with synthetic threats, knowing who, or what, you’re interacting with has never been more critical.

The organizations that will manage NHIs most effectively are those that treat identity not as a static credential, but as a dynamic signal of trust; continuously verified, adaptively managed, and comprehensively secured.

Alix Melchy, VP of AI at Jumio

About the Author

Alix Melchy is the VP of AI at Jumio, where he leads teams of machine learning engineers across the globe with a focus on computer vision, natural language processing and statistical modeling. An experienced AI leader, Melchy has a passion for turning AI-innovation into enterprise-grade AI systems, fostering the responsible practice of AI and shaping a secure digital landscape. 

Alix can be reached on LinkedIn and at his company’s website https://www.jumio.com/

Photo by Google DeepMind: https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-artist-s-illustration-of-artificial-intelligence-ai-this-image-depicts-how-ai-can-help-humans-to-understand-the-complexity-of-biology-it-was-created-by-artist-khyati-trehan-as-part-17484975/