Machine Identities: The Missing Link in Ransomware Playbooks and the Readiness Gap

Ransomware threats are outrunning defenses, a trend highlighted by Ivanti’s 2026 State of Cybersecurity Report. The preparedness gap widened across every threat category, with ransomware showing the widest split: 63% of security professionals rate it as high or critical, yet only about 30% feel “very prepared” to defend against it—a 33-point gap that grows year over year. At the same time, CyberArk’s 2025 Identity Security Landscape paints a related, troubling picture: there are 82 machine identities for every human in organizations worldwide, and 42% of those machine identities have privileged or sensitive access. These data points foreshadow a blunt reality: traditional playbooks focus on human and device credentials, leaving machine credentials—service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates—largely untouched.

The most authoritative playbook frameworks acknowledge a containment-first mindset, but they don’t adequately address machine identities. Gartner’s guidance on ransomware preparation calls for resetting impacted user and host credentials during containment, yet the accompanying Ransomware Playbook Toolkit walks teams through four phases—containment, analysis, remediation, and recovery—without a practical route to reset the non-human credentials that now power most attacks. The containment steps in the standard playbooks rely on three credential resets, all centered on Active Directory: force logout of affected user accounts, force password changes for those accounts, and reset the device account. Three steps, zero non-human credentials. In other words, machine identities—service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates—are absent from the command chain. This blind spot persists even as other numbers confirm the urgency: 51% of organizations report a cybersecurity exposure score, 27% rate their risk exposure as excellent, and 64% are investing in exposure management, yet that investment often fails to translate into comprehensive containment.

The consequences of ignoring machine identities become stark in practice. Gartner warns that poor identity and access management remains a primary starting point for ransomware, with compromised credentials used by initial access brokers and data dumps. In the recovery phase, updating or removing compromised credentials is critical; without it, attackers will simply regain entry. Machine identities are IAM too. Compromised service accounts are credentials. Yet containment procedures don’t treat them that way. The ransomware clock is ticking: Gartner notes ransomware can be deployed within a day of initial access in more than half of engagements, and CrowdStrike’s data show the economic pain is real—recovery costs can reach ten times the ransom, while downtime in typical incidents averages millions of dollars. Even when organizations pay the ransom, the outcomes are far from guaranteed: 93% of those who paid still had data stolen, and 83% faced additional attacks. The takeaway is clear—without a robust machine-identity strategy, you’re not truly containing the threat, you’re only delaying it.

What follows is an urgent blueprint: build a live inventory of machine identities and map ownership pre-incident, so you can revoke access across the entire trust chain rather than just at the compromised endpoint. Network isolation alone cannot revoke trust; machines authenticate across boundaries, so containment must span the entire identity network—from service accounts to API tokens, from certificates to automation scripts. Detection logic also must evolve to recognize machine-behavior anomalies—unusual API calls, tokens used outside planned windows, or service accounts authenticating from unfamiliar locations. Today, 85% of security teams admit traditional detection cannot keep pace with modern threats, and only 53% have deployed AI-powered threat detection. The goal is not just more alarms but smarter, identity-aware responses that cut the attacker’s path before it becomes a breach. And as agentic AI comes online, the stakes rise: 87% of security professionals say integrating agentic AI is a priority, 77% are comfortable letting autonomous AI act without human oversight, but only 55% report using formal guardrails. Each new autonomous agent creates more machine identities to govern, and if governance lags, the next tabletop exercise will reveal a larger exposed surface in real incidents.

Beyond the technical, the governance question mirrors broader societal debates about AI and online safety. From political leaders touting restrictions on social platforms to tech giants navigating safety warnings in AI tools, the lesson is the same: policy and practice must keep pace with technology. Reports of social-media restrictions for under-16s and calls to curb AI chatbots reflect a growing appetite for safeguards that matter in real time. They underscore the reality that while AI can augment defense, it also expands the potential attack surface if not properly governed. In the meantime, the ransomware economy continues to professionalize: downtime costs mount, data exfiltration persists even when payments occur, and attackers seek the fastest path to persistence. If organizations want to survive and thrive in this era, they must treat machine identities as first-class citizens in their security playbooks, integrate them into containment and recovery, and embed governance that scales with autonomous systems. Only then will the next tabletop reveal resilience rather than a new vulnerability.

Sources and further reading:

1. Most ransomware playbooks don’t address machine credentials. Attackers know it.
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9. Sidney Blumenthal — Trump’s Obama and Bad Bunny posts crystallize his political philosophy