Securing the invisible workforce

Non-human identities are now the majority of the identity estate in most enterprises. Service principals access organizational resources across SharePoint, Azure, and Microsoft 365, Service accounts run critical business processes on-premises, OAuth apps move data across SaaS boundaries, and AI agents increasingly operate autonomously at machine speed.

As NHIs have grown in number and importance, so to have the threats targeting them. Midnight Blizzard showed how damaging compromised NHI can be. Attackers moved laterally across cloud resources and accessed sensitive data without ever triggering user-centric controls like MFA. The challenge many security teams are faced with however is that they simply do not have the visibility into what NHI’s even exist within their organization. Unlike their human counterparts, NHI can vary drastically in purpose, behaviour and risk profile. The one consistency is that most organizations lack a formal process for their creation, management and governance. For instance, while these identities often carry high and standing privileges, those permissions are typically granted at creation and never revisited. They authenticate programmatically so they cannot be enrolled in, or benefit from the protections of multi-factor authentication.

As AI adoption accelerates, this issue has become even more urgent. Every AI agent needs an identity to function. That identity accesses data, invokes APIs, and takes action, autonomously, continuously, and at an unprecedented velocity.  But because AI tooling has moved faster than guidance, many agents were never given identities of their own, many riding on existing Service Principles. This means that those ordinary app registrations may in fact represent autonomous agents making decisions and taking action. This new reality further compresses the window between compromise and impact and makes securing non-human identities a prerequisite for safely deploying AI at enterprise scale.

Today, I am excited to share more about the non-human identity protection available within Microsoft Defender. These capabilities bring NHIs into the same unified platform where security teams already work and protect human identities with purpose-built experiences for discovery, risk assessment, business context, governance, threat detection, and attack disruption.

The Challenge:

We hear consistently from customers that they cannot answer fundamental questions about their NHI estate:

• How many non-human identities exist? Across Entra ID, Active Directory, and SaaS applications, the true count consistently exceeds expectations, often by an order of magnitude.
• Which ones are still in use? NHIs accumulate over time. Decommissioning is rare and dormant identities retain active permissions indefinitely.
• Which ones hold more access than they need? Permissions are granted broadly at provisioning and seldom revisited. Over-privilege is not the exception—it is the default state.
• Who is responsible for them? Without established ownership, remediating a risky NHI requires significant manual effort just to identify the right person to engage.
• Which ones are powering AI agents? Many agents ride on NHIs created long before the agent existed, making them indistinguishable from routine integrations.

These are the questions that drive the capabilities we are delivering.

Raising the bar for NHI protection with Defender

Microsoft Defender helps protect non-human identities through six integrated focus areas: Visibility, Risk analysis, relationships and access mapping, governance policies, AI Agent awareness and Detection and Disruption. Together, these areas help organizations discover NHI risk, understand relationships and permissions, enforce governance, identify AI-driven identity activity, and detect or disrupt threats before they escalate.

1. Visibility:

When Entra service principals, Active Directory service accounts, and SaaS-connected OAuth apps are managed in separate consoles with separate workflows, security teams cannot form a coherent picture of NHI exposure. These gaps in visibility translate directly into gaps in protection.

Defender delivers a unified identity inventory for both human and non-human identities within a single view and investigation workflow. For non-human identities, coverage includes:

Unified visibility across all non-human identities in a single pane of glass

This consolidated inventory is the foundation that security insights, risk scoring, business context, governance, and threat detection all build on. Security teams work from one place, using the same investigation workflows they already use for human identities, across the entire NHI population.

2. Risk insights and analysis:

Visibility into what exists is the starting point. What security teams need next is a clear understanding of which identities carry risk, what kind of risk, and how they should prioritize. Similar to how we review risk signals for human identities, Defender continuously evaluates the NHI estate and surfaces findings across key risk pivots:

Actionable insights into your unique NHI footprint

Unused Identities

NHIs that have not authenticated over extended periods but retain active permissions. These identities serve no current business purpose while remaining fully available for misuse if compromised.

Over-Privileged Identities

NHIs whose granted permissions significantly exceed their observed usage. Defender analyses the gap between what an identity can do and what it actually does, identifying where privilege can be safely reduced without impacting operations.

High-Privileged Identities

Some NHI’s however require elevated roles or broad permissions to perform their intended use. These NHIs pose the highest lateral movement risk if compromised. For context, these privileges can sometimes exceed the access held by admins in the organization.

Identity Risk Score for NHIs

The new Identity Risk Score within Defender also extends to NHI. Ever NHI now has a dynamic risk score , informed by Microsoft’s global threat intelligence, exposure indicators, and observed activity patterns.

The score is fully explainable. For every NHI, Defender shows the specific factors that contributed—what combination of privilege, exposure, and activity drove the assessment, and why. Analysts see the reasoning directly: an identity scored high because it is unused, holds broad directory permissions, and is published by an unverified publisher. This means analysts can act on the score with confidence, without needing to conduct a separate investigation to understand what it means.

These insights allow teams to rank their entire NHI estate by risk and systematically focus investigation where it matters most.

Risk insights for NHI for effective prioritization

3. Relationship mapping:

Knowing that an NHI is risky is necessary but not sufficient for remediation. Security teams need business context: what application depends on this identity, who owns it, what resources can it access, and with what permissions.

Without this information, even a critical finding stalls. Can we disable this identity, or will it break a production workflow? Who do we contact to coordinate? What is the scope of exposure if this identity is compromised?

Defender introduces a Graph for NHIs that visually maps these relationships directly.

Graph connecting risk to business context for faster remediation

• What application depends on this NHI? Understanding downstream dependencies before taking remediation action.
• Who owns it? Identifying the owner for coordinated response.
• What resources or crown jewels does it access, and with what permissions? Determining the sensitivity of accessed resources to assess actual severity.

With this context directly available in the investigation experience, security teams can assess risk, evaluate business impact, and coordinate remediation without switching tools or conducting manual discovery.

4. Governance policies

When we extrapolate this out to enterprise scale, with thousands to tens of thousands of NHIs, manual remediation simply cannot keep pace with the rate at which risk accumulates. Organizations need governance policies that enforce decisions automatically and consistently.

Defender enables this through governance policies. Organizations can define policies that leverage the insights Defender surfaces like unused timeframe, privilege level, risk score, over-privilege status, AI agent association and then map them to automated disablement of identities that exceed acceptable risk.

Example: An NHI that has been unused for 90+ days, holds high-privilege roles, and carries a risk score above 70 exceeds the organization’s risk tolerance → disable the identity.

Automated governance policies that turn risk insights into enforcement at scale

This shifts NHI security from periodic audit cycles to continuous posture management. The NHI estate stays within organizational risk tolerance because policy enforces the standard automatically, at the scale the environment demands.

5. AI Agent awareness

Agents built on platforms like Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and third-party frameworks require identities to authenticate, access data, and take action. In practice, many agents operate using traditional NHI that were provisioned for other workloads, making them indistinguishable from routine integrations at the identity layer.

The risk profile, however, is materially different:

• Agents are autonomous. They make decisions and execute actions without human approval at each step.
• Agents are high-velocity. They perform hundreds of operations per minute across multiple systems.
• Agents interact with sensitive data. They access documents, query databases, read communications, and invoke APIs, often with broad permissions to support flexible workflows.

When a misconfigured identity backs an AI agent, the risk compounds significantly because the agent continues to operate autonomously, with legitimate access, at machine speed, across whatever resources it can reach.

Defender infers which NHIs are used by AI agents and surfaces this signal directly in the inventory, risk insights, and assessment. This enables security teams to prioritize investigation of agent-backed NHIs and apply differentiated governance like stricter controls, shorter review cycles, and tighter privilege boundaries for identities backing

 

Visibility into service principals powering AI agents and their associated risk

6. Detection and disruption

Posture and governance reduce the attack surface. But when an attacker compromises a non-human identity, detection speed and response automation determine whether the attack is contained or succeeds.

Microsoft Defender brings the same detection and disruption capabilities that protect human identities to the non-human estate.

Threat Detection for NHIs

Defender detects anomalous and malicious activity involving non-human identities using behavioral analytics and Microsoft’s global threat intelligence. Detections are purpose-built for how NHIs operate because the signals indicating compromise in a NHI is fundamentally different from those in a human account, and our detection models reflect that.

Detecting anomalous and suspicious activities on non-human identities

Every alert is enriched with full context from the identity inventory, risk insights, and graph. Analysts see not just what happened, but which identity was involved, what it can reach, who owns it, and how critical it is immediately, without manual correlation.

Disrupting Attacker Persistence

We are introducing new disruption capabilities designed to address the persistence techniques attackers use against non-human identities. These capabilities focus on the specific actions that turn a legitimate non-human Identity  into an attack path, such as adding credentials for off-tenant use or modifying permissions and role assignments to expand access.

Rather than broad remediation, the approach targets the exact moves attackers use to establish and maintain control. By directly addressing actions like unauthorized credential additions and privilege expansion, these capabilities help remove attacker access while preserving legitimate application functionality.

Why This Maters

Every AI agent requires an identity. As organizations scale agent deployments, the NHI estate grows with them and inherits every existing gap: over-privilege, absent ownership, insufficient monitoring.

What has changed is speed. An AI agent with a compromised identity operates autonomously and never sleeps. The window between compromise and impact has compressed to the point where periodic manual review is no longer adequate. Automated visibility, continuous risk assessment, policy-driven governance, and real-time detection and disruption are now requirements.

The organizations investing in NHI protection today are building the security foundation their AI strategy depends on.

Getting Started

Non-human identity protection is available in Microsoft Defender today:

• Visit the unified identity inventory in Defender to see all NHIs across Entra ID, Active Directory, and SaaS.
• Review risk insights to identify unused, over-privileged, high-risk NHIs, and NHIs used by agents.
• Explore the identity graph to understand business context, ownership, and resource access.
• Configure risk-based governance policies to enforce organizational risk tolerance at scale.

These capabilities are integrated into the same platform and workflows security teams already use for human identity protection—no separate tools, no additional deployment. Learn more about the NHI protections provided by Defender within our docs here.