Workforce & Customer IAM (SSO/MFA)

Japan's National Police Agency announced on September 18 that a person believed to be a North Korean IT worker applied in May 2025 for an engineer position at the domestic cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer. The applicant attached a résumé to the recruitment form under someone else's identity and applied directly rather than through an intermediary, but the company noticed suspicious behavior and responded, so no hiring or damage resulted. According to the National Police Agency, the applicant accessed the recruitment form using multiple VPN services, listed a Gmail address as contact information, and stated in the résumé a broad range of skills in programming languages, blockchain, and cloud services, along with graduation from a European university and work experience in cities in Europe and Asia. In an online interview, the applicant said they were from Malaysia and living in Finland, but refused to relocate to Japan or work on-site, or said they would agree only if it were six months out, insisted on being paid in cryptocurrency, frequently checked another monitor during the interview, and at times another person's voice could be heard from behind. The National Police Agency and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believe that the cyberattack group WaterPlum's activities and some of the foreign-currency earning operations by North Korean IT workers are centrally linked to the Workers' Party of Korea's Bureau 313, and the IP addresses used by the group's attackers, the North Korean IT workers, and the applicant to bitFlyer matched.

Microsoft has told federal buyers that a new top government tier of its productivity suite, plus a companion agent-management product, will be available for Government Community Cloud customers to purchase on October 1, with individual capabilities lighting up in phases as each workload clears its required government security accreditation. The new suite layers Copilot, identity and security tooling, and agent-governance controls on top of the prior government tier, with the headline addition being Agent 365, which Microsoft has framed on the commercial side as providing security operations, financial operations, and observability and manageability of token spending across business processes. Microsoft has not disclosed per-seat pricing for the new tier or paid conversion rates from earlier no-cost federal Copilot deployments, leaving any government revenue forecast impossible, and the stock closed at $497.12, down 2.74% over the past year. On the commercial side, net paid seats more than doubled sequentially to over 30 million Copilot seats, while full-year capital expenditures hit $115.95 billion and free cash flow fell 23.19% in the quarter. Analysts carry an average price target of $572.92 with 38 Buy and 14 Strong Buy ratings, and the variable that decides the bull and bear cases is what Microsoft discloses in coming quarters about paid government seat counts and workload authorization progress rather than the October launch itself.

Cloudbrink introduced OnGuard technology that extends a single Cloudbrink security and connectivity policy across users, devices and machines, taking aim at complex multi-product enterprise security stacks. The expanded platform gives enterprises an alternative to deploying and managing separate Cisco products for secure access, internet security, AI security and remote connectivity, consolidating ZTNA, Internet Security, Secure Web Gateway and AI security into one offering. OnGuard allows policy enforcement to begin when a device itself comes online, even before a user logs in, and to continue independently of the user session, with features including instant OnGuard availability, admin authorization, admin session termination, centralized visibility and selective policy control. CEO Prakash Mana said a single Cloudbrink platform can eliminate a significant portion of the Cisco secure-access stack, arguing that Umbrella, AnyConnect, Secure Access and AI Defense still force enterprises to manage multiple technologies, policies and operating models. The expansion builds on existing deployments, including at one U.S. insurance company where Cloudbrink replaced an environment that included Cisco AnyConnect and Fortinet, moving 300 employees on the first day and more than 600 during the first week, after which remote-connectivity support calls "pretty much disappeared," according to its VP of IT.

The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, together with Thailand Post Company Limited and the Office of the Personal Data Protection Committee, is pressing ahead with the development of the Digital Post ID, or D/ID, a digital delivery code aimed at raising data security in the parcel delivery process. The system replaces the display of full names, addresses and phone numbers on envelopes or parcel boxes with a QR Code, reducing unnecessary exposure of personal data while improving convenience and accuracy in identifying delivery points. Mr. Chaichanok Chidchob, Minister of Digital Economy and Society, said D/ID is one of the key infrastructures that will raise the country's data management to be more secure and ready for future use. Dr. Danant Suphattharaphun, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Thailand Post Company Limited, said Thailand Post has begun piloting D/ID with more than 24,000 of its personnel and plans to expand awareness and trial use to the general public, as well as extend linkages with government agencies, the private sector and various service providers. At present, members of the public can already download D/ID and create their own code for use. Meanwhile, Police Colonel Surapong Plengkam, Secretary-General of the Personal Data Protection Committee, said the PDPC will continue to support and advise Thailand Post, promoting the adoption of Privacy by Design principles and the use of only necessary data from the design stage of systems and services.

IDrive announced on September 14, 2026 that it has added Microsoft Entra ID Backup to its IDrive Microsoft Office 365 Backup solution, extending protection to the identity and access management layer. The new capability automatically backs up critical Entra ID objects and settings to the IDrive cloud, covering users, groups, roles and administrators, administrative units, app registrations, enterprise applications, devices, policies, sign-in logs, audit logs, device configurations, device compliance policies, and BitLocker recovery keys. Key features include frequent automated snapshots, change tracking with historical comparison views, granular and bulk recovery that preserves relationships, point-in-time restore, centralized management of Entra ID and Office 365 backups from a single web console, and AES-256 encrypted storage in the IDrive cloud. The addition complements existing IDrive Microsoft Office 365 Backup support for OneDrive, Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Groups. Microsoft Entra ID Backup is available for $10 per Entra ID seat per year with unlimited storage.

Trust Stamp Inc is expanding its partnership with ID Dataweb, extending the identity verification firm's use of Trust Stamp's biometric tokenization and identity fraud mitigation technology across its enterprise customer base. The expansion builds on three years of joint work serving one of the three largest life insurance providers in the United States, Trust Stamp said. ID Dataweb, a provider of identity threat detection and risk mitigation services, will now use Trust Stamp's technology more broadly across its growing roster of enterprise clients. Trust Stamp's patented Irreversibly Transformed Identity Token technology converts biometric data into tokens that can be revoked, a design meant to reduce the risks of storing raw biometric data while enabling identity verification. Trust Stamp president Andrew Gowasack said expanding the relationship represents an important next step in the company's commercial growth strategy and creates an opportunity to bring its IT2 technology to a broader range of enterprise customers, while ID Dataweb chief operating officer Matt Cochran said the partnership shows the value of combining innovative, privacy-preserving technologies to solve real-world identity challenges.

Salesforce is positioning its Trust Boundary as the definitive architecture for the agentic enterprise at Dreamforce 2026, but the trust stack has not coalesced into a single platform and has instead fractured into three distinct, often incompatible domains: governance specification, runtime authority, and runtime enforcement. Governance specification remains a crowded, nascent field where enterprises cobble together stacks from vendors like Okta, IBM, Broadcom, and Dataiku, a focus supported by the UC Berkeley MAST taxonomy finding that 79% of multi-agent failures trace to specification problems rather than model limitations. Runtime authority is shifting from static permissions to dynamic models, with Akeyless introducing intent-based access control and CrowdStrike pushing SPIFFE-based identities, though Akeyless CEO Oded Hareven says there is still no single place issuing, governing, and revoking that authority. Runtime enforcement, the domain of bidirectional API security and agent fabrics, was recently exemplified by the expanded integration between Akamai and MuleSoft, and matters because 87% of organizations reported an API security incident in 2025. Despite the marketing at Dreamforce, no single vendor covers all three layers, and the unified solution is in practice a multi-vendor assembly project, a fragmentation that feeds a merchant readiness paradox in which 42% of merchants are testing agentic systems while only 3% of transactions actually involve agents. Gartner warns that 40% of autonomous AI efforts will be partially derailed by governance gaps discovered only after production incidents, and with Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face and Stripe's $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, the industry's largest acquirers are buying routing infrastructure at premium valuations, signaling that the orchestration layer's fragmentation is itself the margin risk.

Okta shares have returned +10.4% over the past month, outpacing the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -2% change, while the Zacks Security industry, to which Okta belongs, lost 7.8% over the same period. The cloud identity management company is expected to post earnings of $0.93 per share for the current quarter, a year-over-year change of +13.4%, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate has moved +6.2% over the last 30 days. For the current fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $3.93 indicates a year-over-year change of +12.3% and has changed +9.8% over the last 30 days, while the next fiscal year's consensus estimate of $4.44 indicates a change of +13% and has changed +3.5% over the past month. Okta's consensus sales estimate of $815.52 million for the current quarter points to a year-over-year change of +9.9%, with the $3.22 billion and $3.55 billion estimates for the current and next fiscal years indicating changes of +10.4% and +10.1%, respectively. In the last reported quarter, Okta reported revenues of $805 million, up +10.6% year over year, and EPS of $1.05 versus $0.91 a year ago, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $792.14 million by +1.62% on revenue and by +9.38% on EPS; the company is rated Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) and graded F on the Zacks Value Style Score.

eMazzanti Technologies' Messaging Architects division has formed a strategic partnership with miniOrange to deliver unified identity and access management for legacy and hybrid IT environments. The alliance brings enterprise Single Sign-On, Multi-Factor Authentication, Privileged Access Management, and Unified Endpoint Management to organizations running on-premises systems, Novell GroupWise, and mixed SaaS environments. The collaboration, developed by eMazzanti President Carl Mazzanti and miniOrange's Gaurav Bansod under CEO Anirban Mukherji, aims to serve businesses underserved by cloud-only identity platforms. The solution consolidates identity management across disconnected platforms like Oracle, Slack, and Zoom without requiring a full cloud migration, extending the life of existing investments for SMBs in sectors such as healthcare, legal, and education.

CrowdStrike has introduced the CrowdStrike Agentic Identity Provider, a new solution that establishes trusted identities for AI agents, positioning Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security as the identity control plane for the agentic enterprise. The Agentic IdP automatically registers every AI agent discovered by Falcon Guardian, issues cryptographically verifiable identities, brokers short-lived and tightly-scoped tokens, and attributes every action to the human or workload behind it. This foundation enables Continuous Identity, which replaces static policies with real-time, risk-aware enforcement. Scott Kriz, GM of Continuous Identity at CrowdStrike, emphasized that traditional identity providers are not built for agents that act autonomously. The announcement was made at Fal.Con 2026 in Austin and Las Vegas.

Epson and STOPware have announced a partnership to integrate Epson's ColorWorks on-demand color label printing technology with STOPware's PassagePoint visitor management platform, enabling organizations to produce full-color, photo-ready visitor badges in real time. The solution, which includes the ColorWorks CW-C4000 and CW-C6000 printers, supports color-coded access levels, department identifiers, logos, and QR codes to enhance security and operational efficiency at visitor sign-in locations. Michael Weitz, product manager for ColorWorks at Epson America, noted the benefits for high-traffic environments such as hospitals, schools, corporate campuses, and government facilities, while STOPware COO Debbie Pendleton emphasized the importance of visual clarity without slowing visitor flow. The partnership aims to replace traditional monochrome or pre-printed badges, which are harder to read and easier to replicate, with a more secure and efficient on-demand printing solution.

LastPass announced a series of strategic product innovations and enhancements to strengthen identity security in the age of AI, including new tools for access management and customer experience improvements. The company cited IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report, which found the average data breach now costs $4.99 million, a record high and 12% increase over last year, with AI-driven attacks up 56% and adding an average of $1 million to breach costs. Among the highlights, LastPass expanded its SaaS Monitoring and SaaS Protect within its Business Max offering, introducing always-on monitoring and more flexible controls. It also launched the industry's first Mobile Smart Scanner, which lets users scan passwords from printed lists and handwritten notes into editable credentials. Additionally, LastPass completed its transition to a Unified Admin Console, began auto-enrolling all consumer accounts in Dark Web Monitoring, and achieved zero-findings SOC 2 and ISO 27001/27701 audits for the second consecutive year. The company also introduced a company-wide sign-up link for business customers and was named a finalist for Best SaaS Product in the 2026 SaaS Awards.