Preparing For The Digital Battlefield Of 2026: Ghost Identitie...

BeyondTrust's annual cybersecurity predictions point to a year where old defenses will fail quietly, and new attack vectors will surge.

The next major breach won't be a phished password. It will be the result of a massive, unmanaged identity debt. This debt takes many forms: it's the "ghost" identity from a 2015 breach lurking in your IAM, the privilege sprawl from thousands of new AI agents bloating your attack surface, or the automated account poisoning that exploits weak identity verification in financial systems. All of these vectors—physical, digital, new, and old—are converging on one single point of failure: identity.

Based on analysis from BeyondTrust's cybersecurity experts, here are three critical identity-based threats that will define the coming year:

By 2026, agentic AI will be connected to nearly every technology we operate, effectively becoming the new middleware for most organizations. The problem is that this integration is driven by a speed-to-market push that leaves cybersecurity as an afterthought.

This rush is creating a massive new attack surface built on a classic vulnerability: the confused deputy problem.

A "deputy" is any program with legitimate privileges. The "confused deputy problem" occurs when a low-privilege entity—like a user, account, or another application—tricks that deputy into misusing its power to gain high privileges. The deputy, lacking the context to see the malicious intent, executes the command or shares results beyond its original design or intentions.

Now, apply this to AI. An agentic AI tool may be granted least privilege access to read a user's email, access a CI/CD pipeline, or query a production database. If that AI, acting as a trusted deputy, is "confused" by a cleverly crafted prompt from another resource, it can be manipulated into exfiltrating sensitive data, deploying malicious code, or escalating higher privileges on the user's behalf. The AI is executing tasks it has permission for, but on behalf of an attacker who does not, and can elevate privileges based on the attack vector.

This threat requires treating AI agents as potentially privileged machine identities. Security teams must enforce strict least privilege, ensuring AI tools only have the absolute minimum permissions necessary for specific tasks. This includes implementing context-aware access controls, command filtering, and real-time auditing to prevent these trusted agents from becoming malicious actors by proxy.

In the coming year

Source: The Hacker News