Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is your organization's security control center for managing and monitoring high-level access to critical systems. Think of it as a sophisticated vault system that safeguards your most powerful administrative credentials while maintaining detailed audit trails of their usage. As we head into 2026, PAM has become crucial. Here's why: Cyberattacks are getting scarier and more complicated.

Managing access can become tedious and clunky. Someone always ends up with too much power, someone else is locked out when something’s on fire, and no one remembers who approved what in the first place. It’s the slow creep of “we’ll fix it later.” However, that “later” is catching up.

Let’s face it, AI is everywhere now. It has moved from novelty to necessity, reshaping the way we work, make decisions and secure our organizations. It guides how we plan trips, shop for essentials and discover information – but one of its most profound impacts is happening across enterprise environments.

We are thrilled to share that John Sileo – award-winning author, cybersecurity expert and President & CEO of The Sileo Group – will take the mainstage as the keynote speaker at One Identity UNITE 2026 in Chicago. John has an incredibly unique perspective to identity security, with a career shaped by personal loss from cybercrime, hard-earned wisdom and a mission to help others protect their digital identities and assets.

Every automated workflow, microservice, and CI/CD integration needs credentials to run, but those credentials often live far longer and reach far wider than anyone intends. The result is a growing attack surface hidden in plain sight. Concerningly, 26% of organizations believe more than half of their service accounts are over-privileged. This is a staggering figure when you consider that machine identities now vastly outnumber human users by 80:1.

Some incidents make security teams wince, not because of a complex exploit, but because they were entirely preventable. This one starts with a contractor getting fired. In May 2021, Maxwell Schultz, a contract IT worker from Ohio, was terminated. Instead of moving on, he re-entered his former employer’s network by impersonating another contractor and using their credentials.

In today’s AI-driven world, machine identities are multiplying faster than humans can manage them. Every API key and automation script is a digital identity, often with standing access privileges that attackers can exploit through leaked credentials or misconfigured policies. Recent research shows that non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human users by more than 80:1 across enterprise cloud environments.

If you were online yesterday, you probably noticed that a surprising amount of the internet simply wasn’t there. Uber, X, Canva, ChatGPT, and dozens of others all began returning internal server errors. For a few hours, it looked like the web had taken the afternoon off. As usual, the immediate assumption was that someone must be attacking the internet. Even Cloudflare initially suspected a large-scale DDoS event. When many unrelated services break at once, it often signals malicious activity.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our MCP server for Apono administrators — giving security and DevOps teams the ability to surface complex access data instantly, without the endless API queries, spreadsheets, or manual digging that slows everyone down. Admins are the guardians of access. But when they need answers like “Which users are included in this access flow?” or “Who has access to production?”, getting that data today can take hours.