Most security teams have focused their identity governance efforts on managing human access.
You’ve got SSO in place. MFA is enforced. There’s a reasonably consistent process for onboarding and offboarding employees. You probably run access reviews on a quarterly basis and, if you’re further along, maybe you’ve deployed a PAM solution to protect privileged user accounts.
This is the result of a decade of hard-won maturity. Human identity governance has been steadily improving.
But the next identity breach won’t come from a compromised human password.
It will come from a machine compromise. Here’s why!
The cloud’s most overlooked attack surface
In today’s cloud environments, machines outnumber humans by 50 to 1. In some environments – especially those with automated deployments and microservice architectures – that ratio climbs even higher.
These aren’t hypothetical “machines.” They’re everywhere: CI/CD jobs that deploy dozens of times a day. Terraform plans that provision infrastructure. Service accounts attached to containers. Bots that run scheduled tasks. AI agents that are starting to proliferate.
These identities are operational. They’re invisible to most security workflows. And they’re dangerously over-permissioned. Worse, most of them don’t have owners. Or expiration dates. Or audit trails.
But they do have access – often deep, privileged access – to production systems, secrets and sensitive data. And when compromised, they don’t behave like humans. They don’t try to log in. They don’t get locked out. They stealthily maintain steady access
From headline risk to daily reality
This is no longer a theoretical concern. It’s a real pattern and it’s accelerating.
The Non-Human Identity Management Group has catalogued 52 real-world NHI breaches, with new incidents added monthly. From Microsoft to Snowflake, these documented cases show that machine identity compromise has become the preferred attack vector – precisely because these credentials operate below the radar of most security tools.
Just a few months ago, BeyondTrust was breached via a compromised API key. The incident affected U.S. Treasury systems – not because someone clicked a phishing email, but because a credential issued to a machine was compromised, quietly and without detection.
Cisco, too, was breached through exposed Active Directory credentials tied to a long-lived service account. These credentials weren’t flagged, rotated, or offboarded. They just existed – until someone found them.
What’s striking is not that these companies were targeted. It’s that the compromise didn’t involve novel exploits or complex tactics. It involved something every company has: stale, unmanaged machine access.
According to the Cloud Security Alliance, only 15% of organizations feel confident in their ability to prevent NHI-related breaches. Meanwhile, 69% admit they’re moderately or highly concerned. And they should be – because attackers have already figured out that machine identities are easier to exploit and harder to detect when compromised.
Why traditional IAM tools are failing
Most IAM tools were built around humans. Their assumptions are logical – for humans. They expect a user to log in. They track sessions. They define roles based on departments or titles. They assume access is assigned manually and reviewed periodically.
But NHIs don’t operate that way.
Machine identities don’t request access. They’re provisioned automatically, often by scripts or orchestration tools. Their credentials are embedded in config files, hardcoded into environments, or issued through vaults that don’t track usage or expiration. These credentials don’t get revoked when no longer needed. They often aren’t rotated – and when they are, it’s a manual process tied to a checklist someone eventually forgets.
There’s no built-in notion of ownership. No approval workflow. No expiration policy.
And when you ask basic questions – Who owns this service account? What is it allowed to do? When was it last used? – you usually get shrugs, or a spreadsheet last updated months ago by someone who no longer works at the company.
That’s a significant governance gap. And it’s growing.
Every identity is a pivot point
Think about what a compromised machine identity enables.
It doesn’t need to be authenticated at the front door. It already has access to what it needs.
It can move laterally across environments. It can extract data, act with the privileges of a trusted service, or modify infrastructure. And unless you’re actively monitoring usage – not just credential issuance – you may not notice anything until long after the damage is done.
In this way, every non-human identity is a potential pivot point – a way for attackers to leap from one system to another, undetected.
And yet, most organizations are still focused on governing human access. They’re locking down user accounts while leaving tens of thousands of machine identities wide open, operating on blind trust and inertia.
This isn’t just a visibility pain – it’s a governance problem
You can’t solve this with better alerts. Visibility alone doesn’t solve for ownership, lifecycle, or policy enforcement. And while tools like vaults are great for secret storage, they weren’t built to answer access questions – or support today’s (modern) cloud infrastructure.
What you need is a way to govern machine identities the same way you’ve learned to govern human ones:
- Inventory them comprehensively
- Assign ownership and accountability
- Define scopes and permissions that match intent
- Automatically expire, rotate, or revoke credentials when context changes
This may sound daunting, but implementing these controls are a critical piece of your IGA program.
The shift that’s already happening
The most forward-thinking teams I’ve worked with have already started making this shift.
They no longer treat service accounts as permanent infrastructure. They treat them as ephemeral, policy-bound identities. They’ve begun mapping their machine identities, tagging owners and enforcing expiration dates on credentials. In some cases, they’ve moved to short-lived credentials that are issued only when needed – and vanish once a job completes.
This is the future of least privilege.
Not just “knowing who has access,” but actively controlling what they can do, for how long and under what conditions – for both human AND non-human identities.
What’s next
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll go deeper into what NHI governance actually looks like – from real-world inventory strategies to policy enforcement patterns, all the way through automation and orchestration.
Because this problem won’t be solved with better spreadsheets or bigger vaults. It will be solved by treating machine access with the same discipline we’ve learnt to apply to humans – which, even after all these years, is still an ongoing process, especially in modern/cloud environments.
And it starts with acknowledging the truth: Machines have never been truly factored into your identity governance strategy.
Visit www.P0.dev to learn more about how to secure access lifecycles for every identity.
About the Author: Kelsey Brazill is the Head of Product Marketing at P0 Security.
About the Company: P0 Security is the Unified Access Control Plane, redefining how security teams manage production access lifecycle across modern infrastructure. Unlike legacy approaches that stitch together PAM, IGA, CIEM, and ISPM, P0 delivers privilege visibility, just-in-time access, and API-driven orchestration in a single solution, purpose-built for production environments to achieve zero touch production. At the core is P0’s continuously updated Access Graph and Identity DNA layer, giving teams real-time insight and control across all identities, resources and environments, spanning multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure. With P0, production access is secure and auditable —from humans to service accounts to agents. Deployed across cloud-native startups, hybrid enterprises and global financial institutions, P0 goes live in under 60 days. No portals, proxies, or patchy workflows required. To explore P0 Security further and book a demo, visit p0.dev
