Who Blew Up Your Attack Surface?

The modern network hums with voices you can't see. Not people, machines. Containers, APIs, CI/CD agents, cloud functions, service accounts, scheduled jobs, and AI agents: an alphabet of non-human identities (NHIs) shouting for attention. They outnumber human accounts by an order of magnitude, and that imbalance is not just inconvenient; it’s lethal. Where identities scatter without lifecycle control or governance, attackers find a jackpot: a single overlooked key, a token in a public repo, a forgotten service account, and the door is wide open.

This isn’t an exercise in doom-scrolling. It’s a call to technical craftsmanship. Expose the problem by shining a light on it, explore the ways attackers will exploit it, be pragmatic and make the changes you need, now.

Attack Surface Explosion

Cloud, on-prem, SaaS, repos, CI/CD: every platform introduces identities and ephemeral credentials. Left unmanaged, each one is an unknown route into the estate. 

Documentation is sparse, ownership often unclear, and discovery rarely automated. The result: a surface area that grows geometrically while visibility grows linearly, if at all.

Why it matters: attackers don’t need every key. They just need one. They probe for the easiest path: service accounts with broad rights, build agents with repo access, or API keys embedded in code. Once inside, they pivot. The explosion of NHIs is the modern equivalent of leaving dozens of back doors unlocked.

Stale, Orphaned, Over-Privileged Non-Human Identities

Non-Human Identities (NHI) persist. Employees leave, projects die, containers get deprecated, and credentials remain. Service accounts tied to sunset apps keep full privileges. Tokens fester. Forgotten SSH keys hang on. 

When compromised, these identities can be powerful, lateral movement becomes trivial. Without lifecycle controls, you have standby hacker weapons inside your perimeter. The root cause is process failure: no clean deprovisioning, no access reviews, no expiration hygiene. Fix that by treating NHIs like organs in a living system: they must be owned, audited, and retired on schedule.

No MFA or Smart Access Controls

Machines don’t click links; they use static secrets. API keys, long-lived tokens, hard-coded certs: these are brittle artifacts that leak easily. They get checked into repos, copied into logs, or embedded in container images. Unlike humans, who can be nudged into MFA, or blocked by phishing detection, NHIs obey only what you give them. They often exist outside common sense rules and security requirements.

The next architecture must move away from the static and fully adopt dynamic, a moving target is hard to hit. Use short-lived credentials, identity brokers, hardware-backed keys, and certificate automation. Make machine access as dynamic as the systems they touch.

B2B and Third-Party Risk

Service accounts rarely stop at internal boundaries. They touch vendor APIs, partner services, and cloud marketplaces. An orphaned identity in an external integration is not just your problem; it’s a supply-chain lever for attackers. A compromised third-party token can ripple through your environment, carrying privileges beyond your control.

Lock this down by enforcing third-party attestation, zero-trust contracts, and least-privilege entitlements for external identities.

Breach Detection Takes Too Long

IBM and other incident studies tell a grim truth: detection of compromised non-human identities can take months. In that time attackers can exfiltrate data, erase logs, and build persistence. Long dwell time is the difference between an incident and an irreversible loss.

You need faster detection and automated response: behavioral baselines for NHIs, event streaming from CI/CD, vault access logs, and integrated Automated workflows that can quarantine service accounts or revoke sessions in seconds.

What To Do,

This is not optional. Treat it like surgery: precise, planned, and with clear ownership.

• Inventory everything, and keep it fresh.
  Crawl cloud platforms, SaaS apps, CI/CD pipelines, repos, containers, and build artifacts. Map identities to owners. If something lacks a clear owner, it’s suspect, quarantine it.
• Enforce lifecycle & ownership.
  Every NHI must have an owner, expiration, and documented purpose. Automate deprovisioning workflows tied to project closure and employee offboarding.
• Move to short-lived credentials.
  Use ephemeral tokens, certificate automation, and identity brokers that issue time-bound access. Vault levels the playing field: centralize secrets, enforce rotation, and log every issuance.
• Adopt least privilege, and test it.
  Shift from "make-it-work" roles to narrowly scoped entitlements. Use automated entitlement reviews and policy-as-code to validate permissions in CI/CD.
• Instrument and monitor NHIs as first-class signals.
  Collect vault logs, API gateway events, CI/CD activity, and cloud audit trails into a streaming analytics platform. Create behavioral baselines per identity type (build agent vs. service account vs. lambda). Alert on deviations.
• Harden supply-chain touchpoints.
  Require mutual TLS, signed artifacts, provenance metadata in builds, and vetting of third-party tokens. Limit long-live credentials that bridge external integrations.
• Automate response.
  Integrate detection with automated revocation: rotate keys, disable service accounts, block IPs, and roll secrets via the vault without manual tickets. Time is the attacker’s friend, automation steals it back.
• Red-team the NHIs.
  Run targeted exercises that mimic a stolen token: can an attacker move laterally using a service account? How quickly can you detect and stop it? Treat NHIs as pen-test targets.
• Educate and mandate developer hygiene.
  Secrets in code are a cultural problem. Make secret scanning, pre-commit guards, and pipeline checks part of every repo. Reward developers for secure deployments the same way you reward uptime.
• Measure progress with meaningful KPIs.
  Track median time to detect for NHIs, percent of identities with owners, percent using ephemeral creds, and number of external integrations with least-privilege enforced.

Modern Age Identity

We built systems to be extremely resilient at the time, but security challenges and conditions change rapidly today. If your IAM system is more than two years old, it may already be antiquated and ill-equipped to protect against todays attack methods. The solution is not a single magic tool, it’s best of breed tools and technical craftsmanship: the hackers are very creative, your team needs to be as creative. Your development teams must be more than filler bodies who have passed a cert test, they must be true experts. You need these highly skilled specialists to assist you in building yourself a flexible identity fabric fortress. 

Machine identities will keep multiplying. Agentic AI will compound those issues. That’s the truth. But you are not helpless. With deliberate governance, ephemeral credentials, and rapid detection, you can turn the noise into a map and lock every forgotten door behind you.

Do it first. Do it well. The attackers are patient; you don’t have to be.