Silverfort And SentinelOne Partner To Tackle AI Identity Risk In Australia

Identity security company Silverfort and AI security platform SentinelOne (NYSE: S) have formed a strategic partnership aimed at securing human, AI agent and non-human identities as automated systems become embedded across enterprise environments.

The partnership brings together Silverfort’s runtime identity security capabilities with SentinelOne’s AI-powered threat detection and response platform, creating what the companies describe as a unified control plane for identity and endpoint security.

The non-human identity problem

The partnership is pitched squarely at a problem that has grown alongside the rise of AI agents and automation in enterprise IT. Modern organisations no longer rely solely on human users to access systems and data. Service accounts, APIs, workload identities and autonomous AI agents now populate enterprise environments, executing actions at machine speed and scale.

Each of these non-human identities represents a potential attack vector. Unlike human users, they often operate with persistent credentials and broad access permissions, and they rarely face the same authentication scrutiny as a person logging into a system.

In Australia, credential misuse is already one of the leading causes of breaches. As organisations automate more workflows, that risk is expanding into non-human identities that operate with legitimate access, creating an attack surface that does not rely on breaking in but on moving through trusted systems undetected.

Real-world attacks illustrate the speed problem

The companies pointed to two recent incidents to illustrate why identity security needs to operate at machine speed.

On 31 March 2026, a North Korean state actor executed a supply chain attack by hijacking the npm credentials of the primary Axios maintainer. The first infection was observed 89 seconds after publication, a pace that no manual workflow could defend against.

A week earlier, SentinelOne caught and blocked a trojaned version of LiteLLM that had been updated by an autonomous coding assistant. The company identified and killed a malicious process chain originating from Anthropic’s Claude Code running with unrestricted permissions. The malicious action occurred without any human involvement – it was a normal, automated workflow. SentinelOne’s behavioural AI caught the trojaned package mid-execution and killed it in under 44 seconds.

While both incidents involved third-party software supply chain attacks, they illustrate how quickly trusted authentication tactics can be exploited in automated IT environments.

Stopping threats at the point of authentication

The joint solution is designed to detect and block identity-based threats at runtime, rather than relying on after-the-fact analysis.

Silverfort’s platform discovers and protects all identity types with runtime access controls including multi-factor authentication, just-in-time access, virtual fencing of machine identities and adaptive policies. It extends identity security controls to resources that have traditionally been difficult to protect, including legacy systems, proprietary applications and critical IT infrastructure.

SentinelOne’s Singularity Platform provides AI-driven detection and response across endpoints, cloud workloads and user identities. The joint solution correlates endpoint and identity signals during real-time execution, enabling data exchange to enrich threat context and accelerate remediation.

Ron Rasin, Chief Strategy Officer at Silverfort, described the rationale behind the partnership.

“Security architectures built around isolated tools are failing to keep up with modern threats,” Rasin explained. “By unifying runtime identity enforcement with autonomous AI security, we are helping organisations stop identity-driven attacks before damage occurs and preparing them to secure the next generation of AI-powered environments.”

“Together, this joint solution enables organisations to secure their entire environment from a single platform, consistently across both cloud and on-premises environments.”

Why identity is the new perimeter

The partnership reflects a broader shift in how security vendors are thinking about enterprise defence. As organisations adopt zero-trust architectures and move workloads to the cloud, the network perimeter has become less relevant. Identity – the credentials and access rights that allow users and machines to interact with systems – has become the primary control point.

That shift is complicated by the sheer volume of non-human identities in modern environments. For every human user, there may be dozens of service accounts, API keys and machine credentials, many of which were created for specific purposes and never reviewed or decommissioned.

AI agents add another layer of complexity. Unlike a static service account, an AI agent may be making decisions and taking actions autonomously, accessing different systems and data depending on the task at hand. Securing those interactions requires real-time visibility into what each identity is doing and the ability to intervene instantly if behaviour deviates from expected patterns.

Australian relevance

The timing of the partnership carries particular relevance for the Australian market. AI adoption is accelerating across enterprise and government, but oversight has not always kept pace, particularly as more access is granted to AI agents, APIs and service accounts.

Jason Duerden, VP ANZ at SentinelOne, has flagged identity as an increasingly important attack surface for Australian organisations, particularly as automation concentrates access and exposes governance gaps.

The question facing Australian businesses is what controls need to be in place as AI begins executing work autonomously, and whether existing identity governance frameworks are equipped to handle the speed and scale at which automated systems operate.

Moving beyond integration

Melissa K. Smith, SVP of Global Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives at SentinelOne, framed the partnership as something deeper than a standard technology integration.

“By joining forces with Silverfort, we’re moving beyond traditional boundaries to create a security ecosystem that is truly autonomous,” Smith remarked. “We want to take the guesswork out of identity protection.”

“Together, we’re delivering a level of visibility and real-time enforcement that neither identity nor endpoint tools could achieve alone, ensuring our customers remain resilient in an increasingly complex threat landscape.”

The companies indicated the partnership will extend to joint research and deep technical collaboration, with identity enforcement embedded directly into autonomous security operations.

Practical implications for security teams

For security operations teams, the integrated solution is designed to deliver several practical outcomes. Identity risk becomes a signal within AI-driven threat detection and automated SOC workflows. Illegitimate authentication requests can be stopped at runtime, and compromised credentials can be isolated and quarantined.

Incident responders gain the ability to surgically remove threat actors without shutting down entire business systems, reducing the blast radius of a breach while maintaining business continuity.

The joint deployment model is intended to simplify security architecture by centralising identity security enforcement, rather than requiring security teams to manage and correlate alerts from separate identity and endpoint tools.

Silverfort counts more than 1,000 organisations as customers, including multiple Fortune 50 companies. SentinelOne protects nearly one-fifth of the Fortune 500 and hundreds of Global 2,000 enterprises.

Last Updated on April 22, 2026 by Nick Ross