TL;DR: Least privilege violations often emerge through excessive administrator rights, dormant accounts, unresolved segregation of duties conflicts, and unmanaged service identities, according to SecurEnds. The practical issue is not awareness but control drift: access grows faster than reviews, remediation, and visibility across human and non-human identities.
At a glance
What this is: This is a governance analysis of how least privilege violations accumulate across people and service accounts, with the main finding that access drift is gradual rather than obvious.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM, IGA and PAM teams need to govern entitlement growth across human and non-human identities before excess access becomes a standing attack path and audit issue.
Context
Least privilege means giving each identity only the access it needs to perform a defined job. In practice, that principle erodes as roles change, temporary access is left open, and service accounts accumulate broader permissions than their original purpose requires.
The governance problem is not a single misconfiguration. It is access drift across human IAM, NHI estates, and review workflows that were never designed to keep pace with cloud expansion and automation. When visibility is weak, excess access becomes normal rather than exceptional.
For IAM, IGA and PAM teams, the question is whether entitlement controls can still keep pace with the rate at which permissions are added, inherited and forgotten across systems.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when least privilege is missing?
A: When least privilege is missing, a single compromised identity can reach far more systems and data than the task requires. That increases lateral movement, magnifies the effect of stolen credentials, and makes recovery slower. The failure is not just more access, but larger blast radius.
Q: Why do over-privileged identities increase breach impact?
A: Over-privileged identities expand the damage a stolen credential can do because the attacker inherits more pathways into sensitive systems. Excess access also makes lateral movement easier and makes containment harder. In practice, every unnecessary entitlement becomes part of the attacker’s available blast radius.
Q: How do teams know if automated access reviews are actually working?
A: Automated reviews are working when exception rates fall, reviewer overrides become rare, and access decisions are grounded in clean role definitions rather than ad hoc exceptions. If certifications keep surfacing the same noisy entitlements, the problem is usually role design, not reviewer effort. Effective automation should reduce ambiguity, not scale it.
Q: What should IAM teams do when least privilege keeps failing in the same places?
A: They should focus on the control points where access is created, extended and forgotten. That means tightening role design, enforcing expiration for temporary privilege, reviewing service accounts separately and linking certifications to actual revocation. Repeating the same review cadence without fixing those control points will not change the outcome.
Technical breakdown
How least privilege breaks as access accumulates
Least privilege fails when permissions are treated as a one-time provisioning event rather than a lifecycle state. Role changes, temporary escalations, cloud expansion and unmanaged application access create entitlement sprawl, which means the identity keeps rights long after the original business need has changed. The result is not just excess access, but a control environment where access can no longer be assumed to reflect current job function. In NHI environments, the same pattern appears in service accounts, APIs and automation tooling that inherit broad permissions for convenience and keep them indefinitely. That is why entitlement governance has to follow access change, not only access request.
Practical implication: Treat entitlement drift as a lifecycle control problem and review access whenever the business purpose changes.
Why dormant accounts and broad service account permissions matter
Dormant accounts are dangerous because they preserve valid credentials and authorisations without an active business owner watching them. Service accounts are worse when they are shared, over-scoped or left outside standard review cycles, because they often underpin integrations and background jobs that security teams hesitate to touch. This creates a hidden access layer that can be abused for privilege escalation, data access or lateral movement. The technical issue is not simply that the account exists. It is that the account remains trusted even when the activity that justified it has ended or changed. In governance terms, that is a visibility and ownership failure as much as an access failure.
Practical implication: Map ownership and usage for dormant and service identities, then remove permissions that no longer have an active operational purpose.
How access reviews and segregation of duties controls lose effectiveness
Access reviews only work when reviewers can see meaningful entitlement data and when the review cadence matches how quickly access changes. If permissions are buried in spreadsheets, scattered across platforms, or inherited through roles, the review becomes a formality rather than a control. Segregation of duties failures amplify the problem because conflicting entitlements can sit unresolved for long periods, especially when teams treat exceptions as permanent. In a mature programme, certifications, SoD checks and remediation workflows are connected, so excess access is not just identified but corrected. Without that linkage, least privilege violations recur and the same audit findings return.
Practical implication: Tie certifications to remediation and SoD enforcement so review findings actually reduce entitlement risk.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: Exploit over-privileged or dormant identities to widen access, move laterally and reach data or administrative functions that should have remained out of scope.
- Entry occurs through ordinary business access that has slowly expanded beyond need, whether through role change, temporary elevation or inherited service account permissions.
- Credential or account abuse becomes possible when dormant identities, excess administrator rights or broad machine permissions remain active and trusted.
- Escalation follows because over-scoped access creates additional paths into cloud platforms, SaaS systems and internal applications that should not be reachable from the original role.
- Impact appears as unauthorized data access, privilege escalation, audit failure, or broader operational exposure across human and NHI estates.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Cisco Active Directory credentials leak 2025: Kraken leaked Cisco Active Directory hashes, including service and krbtgt accounts; Cisco says they came from its 2022 breach, not a new one.
- Azure Key Vault Contributor escalation 2024: Datadog found Azure Key Vault Contributor could add itself to access policies and read every secret, key and certificate in a vault.
Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Least privilege violations are a lifecycle problem, not a point-in-time misconfiguration. The article shows that access expands through role change, temporary elevation and accumulation, then survives long after the original justification fades. That pattern matters because governance fails when organisations treat entitlement as static rather than something that must be continuously revalidated across human users and service accounts. The practitioner conclusion is straightforward: least privilege has to be governed as an ongoing state change.
Service account sprawl is now part of the least privilege problem, not a separate niche issue. The article correctly places automation, cloud growth and machine identities inside the same entitlement conversation as users and administrators. That matters because NHI estates often inherit broader access than human accounts precisely because teams prioritise continuity over precision. The implication is that identity governance cannot claim maturity if service identities are excluded from the same visibility and certification discipline.
Unused access is the clearest signal that entitlement governance has drifted away from business need. Dormant accounts, temporary access that never expires and repeated audit findings are all symptoms of a programme that measures access creation more reliably than access removal. This is where least privilege becomes an assurance problem, not just an access model. The practitioner conclusion is to treat unused permissions as evidence of control decay, not harmless inventory noise.
Access reviews only work when they are paired with remediation authority. The article highlights a familiar failure mode: organisations know the warning signs, yet permissions continue to accumulate because reviews are too infrequent or too manual to change anything. That is exactly why recertification, SoD validation and policy enforcement need to be operationally connected. The practitioner conclusion is that review completion without revocation is not governance, it is documentation.
Identity blast radius is the right concept for understanding modern least privilege drift. Once cloud, SaaS and NHI permissions spread across systems, every excess entitlement increases the number of reachable assets from a single identity. That is why the issue is not only compliance exposure but attack-path expansion across the estate. The practitioner conclusion is to measure how far one identity can reach, then shrink that reach before incidents or audits do it for you.
From our research library:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Read next: Service Account Security Guide
What this signals
Identity blast radius: excess privilege is best understood as the amount of reach one identity has across cloud, SaaS and internal systems. When that reach grows faster than governance can review it, least privilege becomes an aspiration rather than a control boundary.
Service accounts need the same entitlement scrutiny as human users because broad machine permissions are often the place where least privilege decay becomes invisible. If your programme cannot explain why a non-human identity has each permission, it is already behind the risk curve.
For practitioners
- Audit standing administrator access Inventory every identity with elevated privileges and flag access that is not required for daily operational work. Remove default admin rights from users whose role does not justify constant elevation.
- Verify dormant account ownership Identify inactive users, contractors, vendors and service accounts that still authenticate or retain entitlements. Reassign ownership or deprovision the account if no active business purpose remains.
- Convert temporary elevation to expiring access Replace open-ended privileged access with time-bound grants and revoke them automatically when the approved task ends. Treat any temporary privilege that becomes permanent as a governance defect.
- Link access reviews to remediation Make every certification outcome feed directly into revocation, role redesign or exception handling so reviewers are not merely recording stale access state. Close the loop on unresolved findings.
Key takeaways
- Least privilege violations usually emerge through gradual entitlement growth, not a single obvious failure.
- Weak visibility into service accounts and excessive privileges shows that governance controls are lagging behind access sprawl.
- The practical fix is continuous review, expiration of temporary access and remediation that removes unneeded permissions instead of documenting them.
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 and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | The article is centered on excess access across service accounts and machine identities. |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Dormant users and service accounts retaining access map directly to offboarding failures. | |
| Recommendation — Reduce excess machine permissions by reviewing NHI entitlements against actual operational need. Revoke access promptly when identities no longer have a current business purpose. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The core issue is whether access permissions remain aligned to least privilege. |
| Recommendation — Continuously verify entitlements and remove permissions that exceed approved access scope. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The article discusses account lifecycle, dormant identities and recurring access review failures. |
| Recommendation — Maintain an accurate account inventory and retire inactive accounts before they become standing risk. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0004;TA0008 — Privilege Escalation; Lateral Movement | Excess privilege creates the escalation and movement paths the article warns about. |
| Recommendation — Map over-privileged identities to escalation and lateral movement risk in your detection and response plans. | ||
Key terms
- Least Privilege: A security principle requiring that every identity, human or non-human, is granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform its function. Least privilege is the single most effective control for reducing NHI blast radius.
- Entitlement Sprawl: The gradual accumulation of too many discrete permissions, often with overlapping access and unclear ownership. It makes access review noisy and offboarding fragile. Grouping entitlements into profiles is one way to reduce that sprawl, provided the groups are designed around real work patterns.
- Service Account: A special-purpose account used by applications, automated tools, or services rather than a human user to interact with systems, APIs, and infrastructure. Service accounts are a primary category of NHI and one of the most frequently exploited attack vectors.
- Segregation of Duties: Segregation of Duties is a control principle that prevents one person or role from combining incompatible permissions that could create fraud, error, or undetected change. In ERP environments, it must account for roles, transactions, approvals, and compensating controls across business processes.
Deepen your knowledge
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Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 24, 2026.
Updated on October 6, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org