Rubrik Zero Labs and Wakefield Research recently surveyed 1,625 IT and security leaders globally to gain an understanding of their readiness to defend against and recover from identity-based attacks. This is in addition to the over 2.2 million snapshots Rubrik scans daily in search of threats embedded in backup data.
As traditional network boundaries have dissolved amid cloud migrations, remote work adoption, and now agentic AI, identity is no longer merely a control layer. It has become the primary attack surface, which threat actors weaponize to gain access to IT environments and “live off of the land” over the course of an attack. The overwhelming majority of today’s breaches are predicated on exploiting trust and valid credentials rather than circumventing network defenses.
Since almost all attacks include a human or non-human identity component—either for initial access, during privilege escalation, or in conducting lateral movement—it’s no surprise that the vast majority of respondents (90%) to our survey agree that identitybased attacks represent the single largest threat to their organizations.
This report aims to quantify organizations’ ability to withstand identity attacks, spotlighting critical areas of focus and projected response timelines.
