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Infographic

Building a Mythos-Ready Defense:
A four-phase identity security roadmap

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Frontier AI models like Mythos can expose privileged access gaps at machine speed. This roadmap shows your team where to start closing them.

Mythos is a preview of how frontier AI models can change the equation for identity security. With a 72.4% exploit success rate and 10,000+ vulnerabilities surfaced across real-world systems, it moves faster than any human red team. You can't outpace it, but you can shrink what it reaches. This infographic walks your security team through four phases: discover every identity, cut standing access, put credentials out of reach and govern AI agents as privileged identities. Start wherever standing privilege exists in your environment.

Mythos:
Five Best Practices for Identity Security Leaders

How to stay ahead of AI-accelerated attacks on privileged identity

9 hrs
Mean time from disclosure to exploitation in 2026, down from years pre-AI
10,000+
Vulnerabilities surfaced during Mythos pre-release testing
$0
Cost to reproduce much of this capability with open-weight models

The threat landscape just changed. Frontier AI models like Mythos surface vulnerabilities at machine speed — and open-weight models make similar capabilities freely available. The mean time from disclosure to confirmed exploitation has collapsed from years to 9 hours. Meanwhile, AI agents are multiplying the privileged identity attack surface faster than most teams can track. 

Five best practices for staying ahead of AI-accelerated attacks 

1 BEST PRACTICE
Continuously discover
every identity
Map every human, machine, and AI identity across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments — including nested groups, inherited permissions, and role chains — before attackers find them.
2 BEST PRACTICE
Eliminate standing privilege with just-in-time access
Replace persistent elevated access with time-limited, task-scoped permissions. A stolen credential has nothing to abuse when privilege doesn’t exist between tasks.
3 BEST PRACTICE
Minimize and broker secrets
Vault admin passwords, SSH keys, service accounts, and OAuth apps. Rotate on a schedule. Broker access so credentials are injected at connection time and never touch an admin’s machine. Eliminate secrets entirely where modern auth (OIDC, SAML) allows.
 
4 BEST PRACTICE
Authorize continuously, not just at the door
An AI-driven attack can begin with legitimate access and escalate mid-session. Point-of-entry checks are insufficient. Instead, organizations should also deploy policy engines that continuously evaluate user, device, resource, and risk context to authorize access at runtime.
5 BEST PRACTICE
Treat AI agents as first-class privileged identities
AI agents authenticate, hold secrets, and act autonomously — making them a critical attack surface. Apply the same discipline as human accounts: discover every agent, vault their secrets, scope just-in-time credentials, govern sessions, and maintain human override.