How should teams govern access when AI agents and secrets collide?

TL;DR: Attackers are increasingly targeting access rather than applications, using compromised tokens, OAuth-connected apps, and AI-driven automation to accelerate reconnaissance, exploitation, and exfiltration, according to Entro Security and Anthropic. The decisive control problem is now identity governance for non-human access, not just perimeter defence.

Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Entro Security: “Attackers Stopped Hacking Apps in 2025 – Now They’re Hacking Access, and AI Is Doing 90% of the Work”.

By the numbers:

• Anthropic says the operation it tracked targeted roughly 30 entities and validated a handful of successful intrusions.
• Anthropic says Claude Code drove 80–90% of tactical operations with minimal human intervention.
• Entro Labs tied exfiltrated data to 1,195 organizations.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when attackers abuse tokens, secrets or OAuth-connected apps instead of apps themselves?

A: The usual application perimeter assumptions break down.

Q: Why do agentic AI workflows make access abuse harder to contain?

A: Because they compress recon, validation and exfiltration into short, repeatable workflows that can outpace human review.

Q: How can security teams tell whether delegated app access is becoming a blast-radius problem?

A: Look for broad scopes, reused credentials, stale grants and integrations that persist after their original business purpose changes.

Practitioner guidance

• Map access, not just applications Inventory tokens, secrets, OAuth grants and connected apps as governed identities with owners, scopes and business purpose.
• Shorten the revocation path Define who can revoke compromised credentials and integrations, where that action is executed, and how quickly dependent access is invalidated across cloud and SaaS environments.
• Review delegated scopes first Focus access reviews on high-trust delegated scopes, third-party apps and service identities that can traverse multiple environments without reauthentication.

Bottom line: Attackers are increasingly using valid access paths instead of direct application compromise, which shifts the control problem toward identity ownership and revocation.

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