Identity attacks are now the primary access path in hybrid estates

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of how identity-based attacks progress from initial access to exfiltration, with machine identities and privileged accounts carrying disproportionate risk.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, IGA, and NHI programmes have to treat identity as the attack path itself, not just the control plane around it.

By the numbers:

• Valid account abuse was responsible for 35% of cloud-related incidents.

👉 Read Hydden's analysis of the identity attack lifecycle in hybrid estates

Context

Identity-based attack paths are now the most common way adversaries enter modern environments. In hybrid and multi-cloud estates, every human login, service account, API key, token, and cloud role expands the identity attack surface, which means traditional perimeter thinking misses the real entry point.

The governance problem is not just credential theft. It is that identity programmes often assume known accounts, stable privileges, and complete visibility, while attackers exploit shadow identities, over-permissioned accounts, OAuth abuse, and weak lifecycle controls across IAM, PAM, IGA, and NHI operations.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams reduce the risk from identity-led cloud attacks?

A: Security teams should treat identity as the primary attack surface by combining continuous discovery, entitlement review, and alerting on credential abuse. The most effective controls are those that shorten the time a compromised identity can remain valid, especially for service accounts, cloud roles, and application tokens that can be reused across systems.

Q: Why do service accounts and API keys increase lateral movement risk?

A: Service accounts and API keys increase lateral movement risk because they often carry broad, long-lived access and are reviewed less often than human accounts. Once compromised, they can be used quietly to traverse cloud services, automation pipelines, and administrative interfaces without triggering the same suspicion as a user login.

Q: What do organisations get wrong about Zero Trust and identity visibility?

A: Organisations often assume Zero Trust is working because authentication is strong, but Zero Trust depends on knowing every identity that can request access. If machine identities, shadow accounts, or stale tokens are missing from the inventory, access decisions are being made on an incomplete trust map.

Q: How should teams respond when identity abuse is detected in progress?

A: Teams should contain the abused identity first by revoking sessions, disabling compromised credentials, and checking for persistence through new accounts or OAuth grants. Then they should trace which privileges were used, because the real question is not just how the attacker entered, but what they can still reach.

Technical breakdown

Compromised credentials and phishing as initial access

Attackers commonly begin with valid credentials, whether stolen from previous breaches, obtained through phishing, or captured in fake SSO flows. Once they have a working account, they do not need to break authentication again to enter the environment. The key technical issue is that identity systems frequently trust the account after first login, even when the path to that login was hostile. In cloud and SaaS estates, this makes replayed credentials, MFA downgrades, and session theft especially valuable to attackers.

Practical implication: teams need detection and response around credential abuse, not just authentication success.

Over-permissioned service accounts and machine identities

Machine identities often carry long-lived credentials and broader access than any human user would be allowed to keep. Service accounts, API keys, and OAuth tokens are attractive because they can move quietly across systems and persist long after the original business need changed. The architectural weakness is lifecycle drift: access granted once is rarely revalidated with the same scrutiny as human access. That creates a hidden privilege layer that attackers can abuse for lateral movement and persistence.

Practical implication: governance for machine identities must cover scope, ownership, and removal as tightly as human access reviews.

Persistence through OAuth abuse and backdoor accounts

After initial foothold and escalation, attackers often preserve access by creating new accounts, modifying existing ones, or abusing refresh tokens and malicious OAuth applications. These methods work because identity systems may treat the new object as legitimate once it has been created or consented to. The result is persistence that survives password resets and can outlast the original compromise. In cloud environments, token abuse is often more durable than malware because it blends into normal application behaviour.

Practical implication: monitor for identity creation events, token grants, and application impersonation rather than relying only on endpoint signals.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker’s objective is to turn a single compromised identity into durable access that can be used for lateral movement, data theft, or destructive impact.

1. entry: Attackers gain initial access through compromised credentials, phishing, or exposed cloud services that accept valid identities.
2. escalation: They enumerate privileged accounts, exploit over-permissioned service identities, and validate additional credentials for broader reach.
3. impact: They establish persistence with backdoor accounts, OAuth token abuse, or exfiltration staging, then steal data or deploy ransomware.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Dropbox Sign breach — compromised Dropbox Sign service account exposed API keys and OAuth tokens.
• IOS app secrets leakage report — iOS apps leaking hardcoded secrets and credentials endangering user privacy.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Identity attack surface is now the primary battlefield, not a side effect of compromise. The article’s core argument is that identity itself has become the attack path across hybrid and multi-cloud estates. That shifts the centre of gravity from endpoint-only detection to continuous identity discovery, entitlement visibility, and lifecycle control across human, machine, and application identities. Practitioners should treat identity exposure as a first-class attack surface.

Machine identities are the governance weak point because they accumulate privilege without equivalent review discipline. Service accounts, API keys, and OAuth tokens often outlive the systems or workflows they were created for. The result is standing access that looks operational but behaves like hidden privilege creep. The implication is that NHI governance cannot remain an audit exercise focused on inventory only.

Zero Trust fails when identity inventories are incomplete. The article reinforces a familiar but still under-enforced truth: access verification depends on knowing what identities exist, what they can reach, and which of them are no longer needed. Without that baseline, Zero Trust controls are applied to an incomplete map. Practitioners should treat identity visibility as a prerequisite for meaningful trust reduction.

Identity lifecycle governance is the control plane that turns attack-path analysis into prevention. The recurring failure pattern in the article is not a single exploit but unmanaged lifecycle states, from creation through escalation to persistence. That is why joiner-mover-leaver discipline, secret rotation, and offboarding matter across all identity types. Practitioners should align IAM, PAM, and NHI governance to the same lifecycle model.

From our research:

• 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
• 59.8% of organisations see value in a solution that simplifies non-human access management and introduces dynamic ephemeral credentials.
• Top 10 NHI Issues is the next resource for teams reworking machine-identity governance after this attack-path analysis.

What this signals

Identity attack-path reduction is becoming a programme-level requirement. If a single compromised identity can lead to cloud traversal, the practical objective is no longer only to harden authentication. Teams need to reduce the number of identities, permissions, and token paths that can be chained into an incident before an attacker reaches persistence.

Machine identity governance now sits beside human IAM as an equal control domain. The gap is not merely operational. It is structural, because non-human identities are often created faster than they are retired. That is why lifecycle ownership, expiry logic, and entitlement review need to be built into the same operating model used for users.

Zero Trust programmes should be measured by identity completeness, not just policy coverage. If the inventory misses service accounts, application tokens, or stale OAuth grants, policy enforcement is incomplete by design. Teams should use continuous discovery and review cadences to close the gap between what they think exists and what can actually be abused.

For practitioners

• Audit identity attack paths across hybrid and multi-cloud estates Map where compromised credentials, service accounts, OAuth grants, and cloud roles can chain into privileged access. Prioritise identities that cross environments or own administrative paths, because those are the fastest routes from entry to impact.
• Review non-human identities for standing privilege Inventory API keys, tokens, certificates, and service accounts, then identify which ones still have broad access after the original use case has changed. Remove unnecessary entitlements and tie each identity to a documented owner and expiry condition.
• Correlate identity telemetry with lifecycle events Alert on account creation, privilege escalation, new OAuth consents, and anomalous token use as part of one identity monitoring workflow. This helps connect the initial compromise to persistence attempts before the attacker reaches data staging.
• Test response against identity-led intrusion paths Run simulations that begin with a stolen password, a phishing-delivered login, or an over-permissioned machine identity. Validate that responders can contain the account, revoke sessions, and remove persistence without depending on endpoint-only evidence.

Key takeaways

• Identity compromise has become the preferred route into cloud and hybrid environments, which makes identity inventory a security control, not a housekeeping task.
• Machine identities create hidden exposure when they retain broad access longer than the business need that justified them.
• Practitioners should align IAM, PAM, IGA, and NHI governance around lifecycle events, because attack paths usually succeed through unmanaged identity states.

Key terms

• Identity Attack Surface Management: Identity Attack Surface Management is the practice of discovering and continuously monitoring every identity that can be used to reach systems, data, or administration paths. It extends beyond user accounts to service accounts, tokens, keys, certificates, and cloud roles, so teams can see where identity exposure creates attack paths.
• Machine Identity: A machine identity is a non-human credential or account used by software, infrastructure, or automation to authenticate and act. In practice, this includes service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates. These identities often hold long-lived access and need the same ownership, review, and expiry discipline as human accounts.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains continuously available instead of being issued only when needed. For non-human identities, it is especially risky because broad permissions and long-lived credentials can persist unnoticed across system changes, enabling lateral movement, persistence, and data access long after the original purpose has expired.
• OAuth Token Abuse: OAuth token abuse occurs when an attacker uses a valid token or malicious application consent to keep access active without relying on repeated password theft. It is dangerous because the token can look legitimate to the platform, allowing persistence in SaaS and API environments even after other credentials are reset.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, machine identity security, and identity lifecycle management are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or governance maturity, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Hydden: From Account Creation to Data Exfiltration. Read the original.