TL;DR: Akeyless says US financial services breaches average USD 6.08 million and credential compromises take 292 days to identify and contain, making static secrets, hardcoded keys, and over-privileged machine identities a direct breach-control problem. In banking, secrets management is no longer a back-office hygiene task; it is the control plane for limiting dwell time, compliance exposure, and fraud blast radius.
At a glance
What this is: NHI Mgmt Group's analysis, drawing on Akeyless's blog post: Financial institution secrets management has shifted from an infrastructure task to a breach-control issue because credential compromise is both costly and slow to contain.
Why it matters: IAM and PAM teams in regulated financial environments need to treat API keys, service accounts, and other NHIs as part of breach containment, not just access administration.
By the numbers:
- The average cost of a data breach in the US financial services sector reached USD 6.08 million in 2024.
- Breaches involving stolen or compromised credentials took an average of 292 days to identify and contain.
👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of financial institution secrets management and breach control
Context
Financial institution secrets management is the discipline of controlling API keys, database passwords, certificates, tokens, and encryption keys that let workloads and systems access banking infrastructure. In this article, Akeyless frames those secrets as a breach-control problem because credential compromise creates long-dwell access, fraud exposure, and compliance liability in regulated financial environments.
The governance gap is not simply too many credentials. It is that financial institutions still treat many non-human identities as static configuration artifacts rather than lifecycle-managed access tokens. Once a secret is hardcoded, shared, or over-scoped, the control failure becomes operational, financial, and regulatory at the same time.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when financial institutions keep static secrets for critical systems?
A: Static secrets create durable access that outlives the original business need, so a single exposure can remain usable for months. In banking, that means payment, reporting, and automation systems can be accessed long after the leak. The practical failure is not just poor hygiene but an incident window that stays open until the secret is revoked.
Q: Why do stolen credentials create such a large risk in financial services?
A: Stolen credentials are dangerous in financial services because one login often reaches multiple applications, data sets, and delegated workflows. The account may also be linked to service accounts or automated processes, which turns a single phished identity into a wider access path. That is why post-authentication governance matters more than login success alone.
Q: How do security teams know whether secret management is actually reducing risk?
A: Look for fewer reusable credentials, shorter credential lifetimes, and a lower number of systems that still depend on manually rotated secrets. If the environment still depends on stored tokens for routine workload access, the programme is managing exposure, not removing it.
Q: How should banks respond when a machine credential is exposed in code or a pipeline?
A: Treat it as an active compromise, not a housekeeping issue. Revoke the credential, rotate dependent secrets, inspect downstream systems for reuse, and review whether the same identity pattern appears in other environments. The response has to focus on scope and persistence, because exposed machine credentials often spread beyond the original leak.
Technical breakdown
Why static secrets create long-dwell access in banking
Static credentials are durable by design, which makes them attractive to attackers once exposed. In financial services, those credentials often protect payment gateways, core banking databases, SWIFT connections, and automation workflows, so a single leaked key can unlock multiple systems. The technical problem is not just theft but persistence: if the secret does not expire quickly, the attacker can remain authenticated long after the original exposure. That turns secrets inventory, rotation cadence, and offboarding into breach-containment controls rather than administrative housekeeping.
Practical implication: reduce the lifetime and reuse of banking credentials so exposure does not translate into months of unauthorised access.
How credential compromise expands from one system to the wider estate
A compromised secret rarely stays isolated if the credential was over-privileged or reused across environments. Banks commonly run hybrid and multi-cloud estates, and the same identity pattern can exist in development, staging, production, and third-party integrations. That means a single leaked API key can become a bridge between otherwise separate environments. The control issue is blast radius: if the credential can move laterally, the breach becomes a platform problem rather than a single-application incident.
Practical implication: scope machine credentials to one function, one environment, and one integration so compromise does not spread.
Why automated rotation matters more than manual review
Manual credential management fails when the attack window is longer than the review cycle. A bank can have good policy language and still leave a token valid for months because no one triggered rotation, revocation, or exception cleanup. Automated rotation changes the mechanism by making expiration and renewal part of the identity lifecycle, not a human memory task. That matters in financial services because auditors, regulators, and responders all need evidence that access is temporary, attributable, and revocable.
Practical implication: automate rotation and revocation workflows for NHIs so credential exposure is time-bounded and auditable.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker aims to turn one compromised credential into durable access that supports fraud, data theft, or transaction manipulation inside regulated banking systems.
- Entry occurs when attackers obtain exposed or stolen credentials such as API keys, database passwords, or SWIFT-related secrets.
- Escalation follows when those credentials provide standing privilege across banking systems or reusable access across cloud environments.
- Impact occurs when the attacker uses that authenticated access to move laterally, manipulate transactions, or exfiltrate sensitive financial data before detection.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Sumo Logic breach 2023: A compromised credential opened a Sumo Logic AWS account; customers were told to rotate API keys and stored credentials. No data impact was found.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Credential sprawl is now a breach-control problem, not an inventory problem. In financial services, secrets do not merely grant access, they determine how far an attacker can move once one credential is exposed. That makes lifecycle governance the control centre of breach reduction, because the weakest credential often defines the incident boundary. The practitioner conclusion is simple: treat secrets as governed access paths, not stored configuration.
Static machine credentials create persistence that security teams often underestimate. A token or key that remains valid for weeks or months gives an attacker a long operational window even when detection exists. This is why the issue is structurally different from ordinary access administration: the credential itself becomes the durable foothold. The practitioner conclusion is to measure how long machine access remains valid after issuance, not just whether a vault exists.
Financial institutions need a named concept for the real risk: credential dwell time. The decisive exposure is not just the presence of a secret, but the time between secret exposure and successful revocation. In regulated banking environments, dwell time converts directly into fraud risk, compliance exposure, and recovery cost. The practitioner conclusion is to make credential dwell time a board-visible security metric.
Secrets governance in banking is converging with NHI governance because the same identities are now in scope. API keys, service accounts, certificates, and tokens are the identities that run payment, trading, and reporting workflows. When those identities are not lifecycle-managed with the same rigour as human access, banks inherit hidden standing privilege and unclear ownership. The practitioner conclusion is to align secrets controls with non-human identity governance.
The regulatory pressure is following the control failure, not leading it. Frameworks such as GLBA, PCI DSS v4.0, and NIST CSF 2.0 are all converging on the same operational truth: credential abuse is a primary route into financial systems. That means compliance evidence now depends on whether organisations can prove that secret issuance, rotation, logging, and revocation are under control. The practitioner conclusion is to treat audit readiness as a byproduct of lifecycle discipline, not a separate programme.
From our research library:
- 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Breaches involving stolen or compromised credentials take an average of 292 days to identify and remediate, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach.
- Read next: Secrets Management Buyer's Guide
What this signals
Credential dwell time: the real control variable is the time between secret exposure and successful revocation. When financial institutions allow machine credentials to persist across environments, the breach boundary expands faster than traditional access reviews can keep up. The programme question is whether issuance, rotation, and revocation are treated as one lifecycle or as separate tasks.
Banks that still rely on shared keys or manually renewed tokens are carrying hidden standing privilege in their automation stack. That creates a control gap that looks like configuration management but behaves like access persistence. The response is to govern secrets as identities with owners, expiry, and evidence trails, not as static settings.
For practitioners
- Inventory every banking secret Build a complete register of API keys, database passwords, certificates, tokens, and service credentials across cloud and on-premises systems so ownership is explicit and stale secrets can be identified.
- Replace persistent access with dynamic issuance Move high-risk machine credentials to short-lived issuance patterns so a compromise window is measured in minutes or hours rather than audit periods.
- Automate rotation for regulated workflows Trigger rotation on schedule and on events such as personnel change, environment change, or detected anomaly, then log every issuance and revocation action for audit evidence.
- Scope each credential to one business function Apply least-privilege policies so a payment, reporting, or trading credential cannot be reused for unrelated systems, reducing lateral movement if one secret is exposed.
- Continuously scan source and pipelines for exposed secrets Check code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and container images for hardcoded keys and tokens, then revoke anything that appears outside approved storage and access paths.
Key takeaways
- Financial institutions face a breach-control problem when secrets are treated as static infrastructure rather than governed access paths.
- Credential compromises in regulated finance can remain active long enough to drive fraud, lateral movement, and audit exposure before anyone notices.
- The control that changes the outcome is lifecycle discipline: ownership, scope, rotation, revocation, and logging for every non-human credential.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack surface, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 sets the technical controls, and PCI DSS v4.0 and DORA define the regulatory obligations.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | The article centres on exposed API keys, tokens, and other leaked secrets in banking systems. |
| NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | The article highlights over-scoped machine credentials that enable lateral movement and fraud. | |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | Persistent keys and tokens are the dwell-time problem the article argues financial institutions must eliminate. | |
| Recommendation — Scan for leaked machine secrets and revoke any exposed credential before it can be reused. Scope each NHI to the minimum banking function it needs and remove unrelated permissions. Replace long-lived secrets with short-lived credentials and enforce expiry on issuance. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Credential lifecycle, rotation, and revocation are central to the controls discussed in the article. |
| Recommendation — Apply IA-5 to manage credential issuance, rotation, and revocation for bank systems. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0008 — Credential Access; Lateral Movement | The breach pattern described begins with credential compromise and can expand laterally across banking systems. |
| Recommendation — Map exposed secrets to TA0006 and TA0008 hunting to find abuse before it spreads. | ||
| PCI DSS v4.0 | Req.8 — Identify Users and Authenticate Access | The article explicitly maps credential management to payment-card environment obligations. |
| Recommendation — Align secret handling with Requirement 8 by enforcing strong authentication and unique credentials. | ||
| DORA | ICT risk management | Financial institutions under resilience scrutiny need evidence that credential risk is controlled. |
| Recommendation — Document credential lifecycle controls as part of ICT risk governance and operational resilience. | ||
Key terms
- Dwell Time: Dwell time is the period between an attacker gaining access and defenders detecting or removing them. Shortening dwell time matters because most damage happens while the attacker remains unnoticed. In identity-led environments, reducing dwell time depends on visibility into access paths, privileges, and session behaviour.
- Dynamic Secret: A secret generated on-demand for a specific task and automatically revoked after use or expiry. Dynamic secrets dramatically reduce the risk of credential exposure compared to static, long-lived secrets and are considered best practice.
- Machine Identity: The digital identity of a machine, device, or workload, such as a server, container, or VM, used to authenticate it within a network. Sometimes used interchangeably with NHI, though NHI is the broader category.
- Secrets Sprawl: The uncontrolled proliferation of sensitive credentials, API keys, tokens, passwords, certificates, across codebases, cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration files. In 2024, over 50 million leaked secrets were found on the dark web.
What's in the full article
Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step guidance for implementing dynamic secrets and just-in-time access in banking environments
- Detailed mapping of secrets and credential controls to GLBA, SOX, NY DFS Part 500, FFIEC, PCI DSS v4.0, and NIST CSF 2.0
- Concrete examples of multi-cloud credential isolation across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises systems
- Operational guidance on automating audit trails for secret issuance, rotation, and revocation
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 24, 2026.
Updated on October 7, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org