Seven in every 10 (71%) of organisations globally suffered at least one identity-related breach in the past year, and on average organisations reported three separate incidents, according to Sophos.
This is based on a vendor-agnostic survey conducted in the first quarter of 2026 which covered 5,000 IT and cybersecurity leaders across 17 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, India, Brazil and Singapore, in organisations with 100 to 5,000 employees across 14 industries.
The survey found that identity attacks are rarely one-off events with repeat victimisation reaching a notable level, with 5% of global respondents reporting six or more breaches. These attacks are driven primarily by human error and weak management of non-human identities (NHIs), a challenge that is accelerating rapidly as agentic AI accelerates attack processes.
Two thirds of the ransomware victims (67%) responding to this survey confirmed their ransomware incident stemmed from an identity attack, establishing identity compromise as a primary delivery mechanism for ransomware. Sophos X-Ops researchers have observed this consistently over the past year.
The financial consequences are steep: the mean recovery cost reached US$1.64 million, with a median of US$750,000, and 73% of those affected faced costs of $250,000 or more.
In Singapore, identity breaches were slightly higher than the global average, with 72% of organisations reporting at least one identity-related security breach in the past 12 months, compared with 71% globally.
“Identity has become the primary attack surface in modern cybersecurity, and this data shows most organisations are losing ground,” said Ross McKerchar, CISO at Sophos. “The non-human identity problem is particularly urgent. AI agents are being granted privileges faster than security teams can track them, and organisations that fail to get ahead of this will find it an increasingly costly gap to close.”
Findings also show that, overall, 10% of organisations reported an identity breach that impacted their business in the last year with the primary consequences being data theft (49%) and ransomware (48%), and financial theft (47%).
Also, visibility remains a critical weakness. Only 24% of organisations continually monitor for unusual login attempts, and more than half check every three months or less.
In addition, detection gaps persist as 14% of breached organisations could not detect and stop their most significant identity attack before damage was done.
Further, critical infrastructure are the most exposed. Energy, oil/gas, and utilities (80%) and federal/central government (78%) reported the highest breach rates across all industries surveyed.
The study also found that compliance struggles signal a broader risk. Organisations that found compliance requirements very challenging had a breach rate of 82.4%, a full 14 percentage points higher than those with lower compliance difficulty (68.3%).
Human error (employees tricked into providing credentials) was cited in nearly 43% of incidents. Weak NHI management, including API keys stored in code, static credentials, and orphaned service accounts, was cited in 41%.
Organisations with weak NHI management are 22% more likely to experience financial theft and pay approximately $150,000 more to recover than average.
The NHI management problem is intensifying. AI agents can autonomously spin up sub-agents, each generating new credentials with broad, persistent access and inconsistent human oversight.
Existing identity frameworks were not built for this, and organisations are already behind: only one in three organisations regularly rotate or audit service accounts and non-human identities, and just 11% do so continuously.
