In September 2023, an MGM Resorts employee got a phone call. It lasted about ten minutes. The voice claimed to be from MGM's IT support team. The help-desk agent reset the employee's credentials. Within hours, slot machines on the Las Vegas Strip stopped accepting cards. Hotel keys stopped working. ATMs went dark. Guests slept in lobbies. It took MGM hours to confirm what was happening: a coordinated breach in progress.
The voice belonged to the hacking group Scattered Spider. The credentials they walked off with belonged to an Okta administrator with standing privileges across every casino, hotel, and gaming system MGM ran.
The initial access was a phone call. The breach was the standing privilege waiting on the other end.
The Same Enemy in Every Headline
Pull the headlines off the major breaches of the last three years and the same villain shows up under almost every one. Credentials get stolen. Sometimes vulnerabilities get exploited or an OAuth app gets abused. The entry vector is whatever the post-mortem latches onto first.It is rarely what turned the attack into a breach.
That happens one layer deeper, at the identity layer.
The Snowflake customer chain ran on standing service-account access to entire customer datasets. Microsoft Midnight Blizzard ran on a forgotten OAuth app with elevated rights into the corporate environment. Change Healthcare ran on a domain account with standing rights across the entire AD forest. Different doors, same room. The room is full of standing privilege.
Ten Years of Saying It. Almost Nobody Built It.
The industry has been writing this down, in the same shape, for ten years. "Zero Standing Privilege" has been a slide on every security roadmap that whole time. Almost nobody got there. Vaults, rotation, and one-time-gate JIT were never going to take us there - they all leave the role sitting on the other side, available the moment a real credential walks in. The breaches kept coming because the architecture kept the doors open behind the credential, and standing privilege is what kept them open.
AI Just Brought Gasoline
The next twenty-four months are going to make this worse.
Anthropic's Mythos surfaced over 2,000 previously unknown software vulnerabilities in seven weeks of evaluation, some of which had survived decades of human review. AI is about to compress vulnerability discovery and weaponization on both sides. The initial-vector mix is going to tilt back toward vulnerabilities while the wave breaks.
At the same time, agentic AI is putting a flood of new non-human identities into enterprise environments - autonomous workers that authenticate, take actions, and operate at machine speed. The default playbook is to attach a standing role and walk away. That ends the way every standing-privilege story ends, only faster.
Both forces point at the same conclusion. Closing entry vectors faster does not change the breach pattern. Whatever gets through the door - stolen credential, AI-discovered zero-day, over-permissioned agent - the blast radius is decided by what privilege is sitting there waiting to be used. ZSP stopped being aspirational the moment AI got involved. It is now the only architecture that survives the next round.
Same Attack, Different Ending
Run the MGM scene again with one thing changed. Same phone call. Same Scattered Spider voice. They authenticate. They look for the standing administrator role they came for. It does not exist. Nobody holds it. When a real MGM admin needs to perform an Okta admin task, they request the role through an access fabric, the request is evaluated in context, the role is created in real time, scoped to the task, and revoked the moment the work is done. Between requests, the role is not a thing anyone can take.
The credential is still stolen. The phone call still happened. There is no breach. The casinos stay on.
That is what Zero Standing Privilege actually delivers, if you can get to it.
The Phone Is Ringing
The next phone call is coming. The next infostealer log. The next zero-day. The next overprivileged AI agent looking for a way to do its job. The entry point does not matter. What matters is whether the role on the other side is sitting there waiting to be taken.
The phone is ringing. The role is still there. The conversation about what comes next is just starting.
