Least privilege violations are widening across human and NHI access

At a glance

What this is: This analysis explains how least privilege breaks down gradually as permissions accumulate across users, service accounts, and cloud systems.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, IGA, PAM, and NHI governance teams need the same visibility, review, and remediation discipline to stop access sprawl before it becomes a breach path.

By the numbers:

• Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security.
• Systems with least-privileged AI access had a 17% incident rate vs 76% for over-privileged systems.
• 53% of security leaders expect AI to run major portions of their infrastructure autonomously within the next three years.
• 17 minutes.

👉 Read SecurEnds's analysis of least privilege violations and access sprawl

Context

Least privilege means identities should only retain the permissions needed for their current job, task, or service function. In practice, that principle breaks down when role changes, temporary access, cloud sprawl, and weak certifications leave more access in place than business need justifies.

For IAM and NHI programmes, the problem is not just over-permissioned users. Service accounts, APIs, and cloud automation often accumulate standing privilege, while governance teams lose visibility into what is still needed, what has expired, and what is simply ignored.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when least privilege is not enforced across users and service accounts?

A: Access expands beyond current need, which creates excess attack paths, audit findings, and harder containment during incidents. The failure is not only more permissions, but permissions that outlive the business event that justified them. Once that happens, the organisation is managing inherited risk rather than current access intent.

Q: Why do service accounts complicate least privilege governance?

A: Service accounts often hold broad, long-lived access that is harder to review than human user access. They are frequently under-documented, inherited from templates, or created for uptime rather than control precision. That makes them a hidden source of privilege sprawl unless they are reviewed like any other identity.

Q: How do organisations know whether access reviews are actually working?

A: Look for declining counts of overprivileged users, dormant privileged accounts, unresolved SoD conflicts, and repeated audit findings. If those measures do not improve after reviews, the programme is producing paperwork rather than remediation. Effective reviews should reduce access scope and shorten the time between finding and revocation.

Q: Who is accountable when excessive access is left in place?

A: Accountability typically sits with the identity, application, and business owners who approve, retain, or fail to revoke access. Governance frameworks also expect security teams to provide visibility and evidence, but ownership cannot be delegated away. If no one can explain why access still exists, the control model has already failed.

Technical breakdown

Why least privilege drifts in real environments

Least privilege drifts because entitlement decisions are often made at provisioning time and then left untouched as roles, projects, and infrastructure change. Cloud platforms, SaaS tools, and automation layers increase the number of identities that can gain access without a matching offboarding event or review cycle. The result is permission accumulation, where access becomes a by-product of operational convenience rather than a controlled outcome. In mature environments, this is less a one-time mistake than a governance failure that compounds over time.

Practical implication: centralise entitlement visibility so access changes can be compared against current job and service need, not old approvals.

Why service accounts create hidden least privilege gaps

Service accounts are often given broad access because teams optimise for uptime and integration success, not for ongoing entitlement precision. Unlike human users, machine identities can persist for long periods, interact with multiple systems, and remain poorly documented. That makes them easy to forget during access reviews and difficult to scope by role alone. When permissions are inherited from infrastructure templates or copied across applications, the result is a machine identity estate that looks stable but is actually overexposed.

Practical implication: inventory machine identities separately from human users and treat every service account as a reviewable privilege container.

How SoD conflicts and dormant access expose governance failure

Segregation of duties failures show that access governance is not only about volume of permissions but also about incompatible combinations. Dormant accounts, especially former employees or abandoned service identities, keep those combinations alive after the legitimate business need has vanished. When access reviews are infrequent or spreadsheet-based, organisations can miss both the conflict and the lingering account. That means the real control failure is not just access excess, but the absence of a reliable process to detect and remove it before it is exploited.

Practical implication: tie SoD checks and dormant-account removal into recurring certifications and remediation workflows, not ad hoc cleanup.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants to turn weak entitlement governance into broader control of sensitive systems, data, or business processes.

1. Entry begins when excessive permissions, dormant accounts, or unmanaged service identities provide an exploitable access path into enterprise systems.
2. Escalation occurs when standing administrator rights, broad service account permissions, or unresolved SoD conflicts let an attacker move from limited access to higher-impact actions.
3. Impact follows when the excess privilege is used to access data, alter controls, or support ransomware, fraud, or lateral movement across connected systems.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.
• Sisense breach — unauthorized GitLab access led to exfiltration of access tokens, API keys and certificates.

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 usually a governance drift problem, not a single control failure. The article is right to treat administrator sprawl, dormant access, and weak review cycles as warning signs rather than isolated symptoms. In identity programmes, permissions rarely become excessive all at once; they accumulate through unchanged roles, expired exceptions, and incomplete offboarding. Practitioners should treat drift as the main failure pattern, not the exception.

Service accounts are where least privilege weakness becomes operationally invisible. Human access reviews can catch obvious role misuse, but machine identities often sit outside the same discipline even when they hold broader and longer-lived access. That is a governance gap across IAM, IGA, and NHI practice, because the entitlement is still active even when no one is actively watching it. The implication is to stop treating machine identities as a separate hygiene task.

Standing privilege is the named concept this article exposes. Temporary access that never expires is no longer temporary, and access granted for troubleshooting, migration, or vendor support becomes a permanent attack path when revocation is missed. That pattern connects human IAM, PAM, and NHI governance into one control problem: access outlives the business event that justified it. Practitioners should view every standing exception as a future audit finding or breach path.

Least privilege maturity depends on continuous remediation, not annual certification cycles. The article’s metrics, such as dormant privileged accounts and recurring audit findings, show that visibility alone does not reduce exposure. Governance only improves when review, revocation, and role redesign happen as a closed loop. The practical conclusion is that identity teams should measure how quickly excess access is removed, not just how often it is found.

Compliance frameworks expose the same underlying entitlement problem across multiple identity types. Whether the control is framed through SOX, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or SOC 2, the operational demand is consistent: prove that access remains appropriate over time. That matters because the same governance weakness can appear in users, service accounts, and automated access paths. Practitioners should align access governance evidence to the identity type actually holding the permission.

From our research:

• Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security, according to The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
• Another 69% of security leaders agree identity management must fundamentally shift to address agentic AI systems, which shows how quickly access governance assumptions are changing in practice.
• For a broader control baseline, see Ultimate Guide to NHIs for lifecycle, visibility, and privilege control patterns that help teams govern both people and machines.

What this signals

Standing privilege is becoming the default failure mode for modern identity programmes. As cloud estates expand and service identities multiply, the distance between approval and revocation keeps growing, which means access control now depends on how fast teams can close exceptions, not just how well they can grant them. The practical signal for IAM leaders is to watch remediation latency as closely as entitlement count.

With 70% of organisations already granting AI systems more access than they would give a human employee doing the same job, per the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey, least privilege is no longer a human-only governance pattern. The next access review problem is whether teams can prove that machine access is bounded by task, not by convenience.

Permission sprawl is a lifecycle problem disguised as a controls problem: once roles, exceptions, and service identities outlive their original purpose, the programme starts carrying inherited risk forward. Teams that centralise review, revocation, and owner accountability will move faster than those still depending on periodic cleanup cycles.

For practitioners

• Inventory all entitlement classes separately Build a single view of employee accounts, privileged users, service accounts, APIs, SaaS entitlements, and infrastructure identities so excessive access can be compared against current business need.
• Revoke temporary access when the task ends Remove troubleshooting, migration, vendor support, and emergency permissions as part of the same workflow that granted them, and confirm revocation before the exception becomes standing access.
• Rework roles that carry unnecessary entitlements Review role design for copied permissions, broad inherited rights, and outdated application access so role structures stop embedding privilege creep into new accounts.
• Fold service accounts into access certification Require owners to attest to machine identity purpose, scope, and inactivity during recurring reviews, and remove service accounts that no longer map to an active dependency.

Key takeaways

• Least privilege fails gradually when permissions outlive the business need that created them.
• Service accounts and dormant identities are often the hardest part of the problem because they hide in plain sight until an audit or incident exposes them.
• The control that matters most is not just access approval, but how quickly excess access is found, reviewed, and removed.

Key terms

• Least Privilege Drift: The gradual expansion of access beyond what an identity actually needs. It happens when roles, exceptions, and inherited permissions are left in place after the business context changes, creating hidden exposure across users, service accounts, and automation.
• Standing Privilege: Access that remains active without a clear expiry or revalidation point. In identity governance, standing privilege is risky because it turns temporary or convenience-based access into persistent exposure that can outlast the original justification and evade normal review cycles.
• Service Account: A non-human identity used by software, workflows, or infrastructure to authenticate and perform actions. Service accounts often have long-lived permissions, so they must be governed with the same entitlement discipline as human accounts, including ownership, review, and revocation.
• Segregation of Duties: A control that prevents one identity from holding conflicting permissions that could let it initiate and approve the same high-risk action. When SoD is broken, the issue is not just compliance weakness but the concentration of authority that can hide fraud or abuse.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security 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 in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by SecurEnds: Least privilege violations and how to detect them. Read the original.