6 Ways to Identify Non-Human Identities (NHIs)
SC Media, Tuesday, June 16th, 2026
Organizations must discover and govern non-human identities across applications to manage AI agent risks.
Non-human identities-service accounts, API keys, tokens, and increasingly AI agents-now present significant security challenges, with this "identity dark matter" outweighing visible identities in enterprises.
Traditional identity management systems miss 67% of non-human accounts created directly within applications rather than centralized directories. The article outlines six discovery methods: starting from the application layer, mapping identity paths, correlating accounts to business context, understanding actual behavior, assessing security hygiene, and operationalizing governance.
This matters because agentic AI can pursue goals autonomously and exploit unmanaged credentials faster than human teams can respond, requiring continuous identity observability rather than one-time inventory projects.