Ransomware Playbooks Ignore Machine Identities — And Attackers Are Exploiting It

The gap between ransomware threats and organizational defenses is widening, and machine identities are at the center of that divide. Even as ransomware remains a top concern for security teams, most formal playbooks still focus almost exclusively on human users and endpoints. Service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates — the fastest-growing class of credentials inside enterprises — rarely appear in containment procedures. Attackers have noticed.

Recent research from Ivanti, CyberArk, Gartner, and CrowdStrike paints a consistent picture: organizations are worried about ransomware, underprepared to stop it, and operating with playbooks that leave an entire layer of identity-based attack surface effectively ungoverned.

The widening ransomware readiness gap

Ivanti’s 2026 State of Cybersecurity Report finds that organizations are falling further behind across every major threat category it tracks. For ransomware specifically, 63% of security professionals see it as a high or critical threat, but only 30% consider themselves “very prepared” to defend against it — a 33-point preparedness gap that has grown year over year.

That pattern extends beyond ransomware. Preparedness gaps widened for phishing, software vulnerabilities, API-related vulnerabilities, supply chain attacks, and even weak encryption. Daniel Spicer, Ivanti’s Chief Security Officer, characterizes this trend as a “Cybersecurity Readiness Deficit” — a persistent imbalance between the speed of threat evolution and the maturity of defensive capabilities.

CrowdStrike’s 2025 State of Ransomware Survey shows what this deficit looks like in practice. Even among organizations that rated themselves “very well prepared,” recovery outcomes were poor. In manufacturing, just 12% of those confident organizations recovered within 24 hours, while 40% experienced significant operational disruption. In the public sector, 60% expressed high confidence, yet only 12% recovered within a day.

Perhaps most telling, across all industries only 38% of organizations hit by ransomware reported that they actually fixed the specific issue that enabled initial access. The rest focused on broad security improvements without closing the precise entry path attackers had used, leaving the door partially open for repeat incidents.

This lack of effective alternatives is reflected in payment behavior. According to Ivanti’s 2026 data, 54% of organizations say they would or probably would pay if hit by ransomware today, despite consistent guidance from the FBI against paying. That willingness to pay signals a perceived absence of robust containment and recovery options — the very capabilities that a more complete approach to identities, including machine identities, is meant to provide.

Gartner’s ransomware guidance and its credential blind spot

Gartner’s April 2024 research note, “How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks,” and its associated Ransomware Playbook Toolkit are among the most referenced resources for enterprise incident response planning. They define a structured response across four phases: containment, analysis, remediation, and recovery, and explicitly stress the importance of credential hygiene during an incident.

In the containment phase, the guidance calls for resetting “impacted user/host credentials” and ensuring that all affected user and device accounts are reset. In the recovery phase, it warns that updating or removing compromised credentials is essential; otherwise, attackers will simply regain access using previously obtained secrets. The note also highlights that poor identity and access management (IAM) practices are a primary starting point for ransomware and that credentials purchased via initial access brokers and dark web dumps are frequently involved.

However, when it comes to specific procedures, the playbook’s scope effectively stops at human users and device accounts. Service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates — all of which are IAM artifacts — are absent from the containment templates. The framework recognizes compromised credentials as a root cause but does not concretely tie that risk to machine identities or prescribe steps to neutralize them during an active event.

That omission is significant given how Gartner characterizes ransomware’s urgency. The research note describes ransomware incidents as operating on a “countdown timer,” where any delay in decision-making introduces additional risk, and estimates that total recovery costs can reach ten times the ransom amount. It also notes that in more than half of engagements, ransomware is deployed within a day of initial access. In this context, failing to account for machine credentials during containment leaves an active avenue of persistence untouched at precisely the time organizations can least afford it.

Machine identities outnumber humans — and many are privileged

While playbooks remain human-centric, the composition of enterprise identities has shifted dramatically. CyberArk’s 2025 Identity Security Landscape report finds that organizations now manage, on average, 82 machine identities for every human identity. These machine identities — encompassing service accounts, application identities, API tokens, and certificates — are no longer peripheral; they are the majority.

Compounding that growth, 42% of those machine identities hold privileged or sensitive access. That means nearly half of all non-human identities can directly reach critical systems, data stores, or infrastructure components. From an attacker’s perspective, compromised machine credentials are a high-yield route to lateral movement and persistence, often with fewer behavioral signals than compromised human accounts.

Despite this, many organizations lack even basic visibility into their machine identity footprint. Ivanti reports that only 51% of organizations have a cybersecurity exposure score at all, indicating that nearly half could not readily quantify or communicate their exposure — including exposure via machine identities — to executive leadership or boards. Only 27% rate their risk exposure assessment as “excellent,” even though 64% say they have invested in exposure management. It is in this gap between investment and execution that machine identities are most likely to disappear from operational planning.

Five containment assumptions that fail for machine accounts

Most ransomware response procedures, whether derived from Gartner or internal sources, revolve around a familiar set of containment actions. When examined through the lens of machine identities, each of these reveals a structural blind spot.

Credential resets designed for humans, not services

Forcing password changes and logouts for users via Active Directory is standard containment practice. Gartner’s sample containment sheet in its ransomware toolkit illustrates the pattern: force logout of affected user accounts via Active Directory, force password change on those accounts, and reset the device account — again via Active Directory.

These steps are necessary, but they are not sufficient. They focus exclusively on user and device objects. Service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, and certificates that may have been harvested or abused during the intrusion remain outside the reset process. Without a parallel mechanism to revoke or rotate these machine credentials, an attacker can retain effective access paths even as user passwords are being changed.

Lack of pre-incident inventory for machine identities

Containment procedures depend on knowing what to contain. Yet many environments do not maintain a comprehensive inventory of machine identities, let alone map clear ownership and operational dependencies.

Service accounts created years ago, API keys embedded in integration workflows, and tokens issued for automation tasks often lack explicit owners or up-to-date documentation. Attempting to discover and classify them during an incident burns time that organizations do not have. Given Gartner’s warning that ransomware can be deployed within a day of initial access, spending days discovering unknown service accounts mid-incident is operationally untenable.

Ivanti’s findings about limited exposure scoring and modest confidence in risk assessments suggest that for a meaningful fraction of organizations, this foundational inventory problem remains unresolved, leaving machine identities effectively out of scope when it matters most.

Network isolation without revoking trust chains

Isolating infected hosts from the network is a staple of ransomware response. However, for machine identities, network isolation only goes so far. Removing a compromised server from the network does not automatically invalidate the API keys or tokens it issued to downstream systems, nor does it revoke the certificates it used to authenticate to other services.

Gartner notes that adversaries often spend days to months in an environment before triggering ransomware, during which they systematically harvest credentials to build persistence mechanisms and lateral movement options. Service accounts and API tokens are particularly attractive during this phase, as they can be collected and reused without necessarily generating noisy signals.

CrowdStrike reports that 76% of organizations are concerned about ransomware spreading from unmanaged hosts over SMB network shares. This underscores how trust relationships can bridge managed and unmanaged domains. Without a clear understanding of which systems trust which machine identities, network-focused containment can leave intact a chain of trust that extends well beyond the isolated endpoint.

Detection logic not tuned to machine behavior

Security operations centers have invested heavily in monitoring human behavior: unusual logins, impossible travel, anomalous user privileges, and so on. By contrast, anomalous behavior by machine identities is less commonly monitored and even less frequently embedded in automated detection rules.

Indicators such as atypical API call volumes, tokens used outside of expected automation windows, or service accounts authenticating from unexpected locations require distinct baselines and analytics. CrowdStrike’s survey shows that 85% of security teams acknowledge that traditional detection methods are not keeping pace with modern threats, yet only 53% report implementing AI-powered threat detection. The specialized logic needed to reliably catch machine identity misuse often falls into the portion of detection capability that has yet to be built.

As a result, attackers abusing machine identities may operate for extended periods with minimal risk of detection, particularly if their activity mimics legitimate automated workflows.

Stale and orphaned service accounts as persistent entry points

Long-lived, rarely rotated service accounts are among the softest targets for attackers. Some were created years ago for projects that no longer exist, or by employees who have since left. These accounts can retain elevated privileges even as the systems or users they were intended to support have changed or disappeared.

Gartner’s guidance calls for strong authentication for privileged users, including service accounts, but this recommendation appears in the prevention section, not within the concrete containment procedures that guide real-time response. Processes such as orphan account audits, systematic rotation schedules, and decommissioning play a vital role in pre-incident hardening. When they are absent, responders are left to scramble to identify and remediate stale machine accounts in the middle of an active event, which is both slow and risky.

Ransomware economics raise the stakes

The financial and operational impact of ransomware amplifies the importance of getting machine identity handling right. Gartner estimates that total recovery costs can reach ten times the amount of the ransom itself when factoring in downtime, remediation, investigations, and reputational damage. CrowdStrike places the average downtime cost per ransomware incident at $1.7 million, rising to $2.5 million for public sector organizations.

Payment does not reliably solve the problem. According to CrowdStrike’s data, 93% of organizations that paid a ransom had data stolen anyway, and 83% were attacked again. Nearly 40% could not fully restore data from backups. Meanwhile, adversary groups have professionalized their operations to the point where they can encrypt files remotely over SMB network shares from unmanaged systems, never deploying the ransomware binary directly onto a managed endpoint. This approach further reduces the visibility of traditional endpoint-focused defenses and places more emphasis on controlling identities and trust relationships.

Looking forward, the adoption of agentic AI threatens to intensify the machine identity challenge. Ivanti reports that 87% of security professionals see integrating agentic AI as a priority, and 77% are comfortable allowing autonomous AI to act without human oversight. Yet only 55% say they use formal guardrails. Each autonomous agent effectively introduces one or more new machine identities — entities that can authenticate, initiate actions, and access data. If organizations struggle to govern today’s machine identity footprint, the arrival of large numbers of autonomous agents will magnify that difficulty.

For security leaders, SOC analysts, and identity architects, the implication is clear: machine identities must be treated as first-class citizens in both prevention and response. That means building and maintaining inventories, defining ownership, integrating machine credentials into detection logic, and explicitly codifying revocation and rotation procedures in ransomware playbooks. It also means pressure-testing those procedures in tabletop exercises to ensure they stand up under time pressure.

The organizations that adapt their incident response to include machine identities will close a gap that attackers are actively exploiting today and be better positioned to manage the next wave of autonomous, non-human actors in their environments. Those that do not risk confronting high-stakes ransomware incidents with playbooks that only see half the credentials in play.