Machine identity security gaps are widening as AI agents scale

At a glance

What this is: Zero Networks argues that machine identity security is weakening as service accounts and AI agents expand faster than governance, with standing access and poor visibility leaving NHI exposed to lateral movement.

Why it matters: IAM, PAM, and NHI teams need to treat service accounts and AI agents as governed identities, because static entitlement models no longer contain the blast radius of machine-to-machine access.

By the numbers:

• Machine and service identities now outnumber human users 109:1.
• organizations anticipate 85% growth in AI agent adoption over the next year.

Context

Non-human identity security is the governance problem that emerges when software, not people, authenticates to systems and accumulates access over time. In this article, the problem space is machine identities, service accounts, and AI agents that now operate at enterprise scale but still sit outside the control patterns built for human users.

The core gap is not simply more identities. It is that standing access, static credentials, and low-visibility background activity let machine identities and agentic workflows evade the controls that normally constrain human access. When least privilege is not enforced continuously, the environment becomes easier to traverse laterally without obvious signals.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when a machine identity has more access than it needs?

A: Overprivileged machine identities turn a single credential compromise into lateral movement, data access, and configuration change. The failure is not only exposure but inherited reach. Once an attacker uses that credential, the damage depends on how far the identity can move across systems, so entitlement scope becomes the core control boundary.

Q: Why do machine identities create larger lateral movement risk than teams expect?

A: Machine identities often have wider, longer-lived access than human users and are embedded in application dependencies. When those identities cross domains or service boundaries, a single compromise can pivot into multiple systems. That is why service-account governance belongs in the same conversation as access containment and directory design.

Q: How do security teams know if NHI controls are actually working?

A: Look for complete inventory coverage, clear ownership, enforced rotation, and evidence that unused credentials are removed on time. If secrets remain active after changes to applications, vendors, or pipelines, the control is not working. Monitoring should also show whether machine access stays within the expected workload scope.

Q: How can organisations prevent AI agents from becoming overprivileged?

A: Start with least privilege, then enforce it through narrow scopes, environment-specific approval, and regular access review. Separate human and agent access paths, prohibit shared credentials, and require every agent to have an owner. Overprivilege usually grows when teams treat agents like applications instead of identities.

Technical breakdown

Why standing machine identity access becomes a lateral movement path

Service accounts and other NHIs often authenticate with persistent credentials and broad entitlements because they must keep systems running. That operational convenience creates a structural weakness: the account is not tied to a person, so access reviews, MFA challenges, and contextual scrutiny are usually weaker or absent. Once an attacker reaches a machine credential, the account can blend into legitimate background traffic and be reused for RDP, LDAP, or cloud access without triggering user-centric detections. The technical issue is not the identity itself but the mismatch between background execution and human-era controls.

Practical implication: map machine credentials to the exact systems they can reach and remove any entitlement that is not required for uninterrupted service.

How AI agents change the NHI attack surface

AI agents are not just another workload identity. They can chain tool calls, accumulate entitlements as scope expands, and act across multiple systems while still appearing to use legitimate access. That means the attack surface is shaped by how tools, tokens, and permissions are inherited over time, not by a single login event. In practice, the agentic risk looks like privilege drift, hidden delegation, and scope creep rather than classic account compromise. The moment an agent can move from one tool to another without fresh governance, the control boundary has shifted from authentication to runtime authorization.

Practical implication: govern agent permissions at the function and tool level, then revalidate access whenever the agent’s workflow changes.

Why discovery and policy automation matter more than static segmentation

Static, IP-centric rules fail when identities move across cloud, on-prem, and automation layers. Identity-based policy has to follow the actor, not the subnet, because NHI access is often dynamic and environment-dependent. Continuous discovery is therefore a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have: teams need to know which service accounts, tokens, and agents exist before they can scope their reach. Deterministic policy engines matter because they can translate observed behaviour into enforceable rules and keep those rules aligned as the environment changes, which manual review cannot do at NHI scale.

Practical implication: replace static network trust assumptions with continuous identity discovery and policy updates tied to observed behaviour.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker aims to turn one compromised machine identity into control over additional internal systems and privileged accounts.

1. Entry occurred when attackers compromised a vulnerable NetScaler appliance and reached stored service account credentials inside the affected systems.
2. Credential access expanded the foothold because the service account had far more privilege than its LDAP bind role required.
3. Lateral movement followed through RDP and domain-level actions, including a domain admin password change and broader control of the environment.
4. Impact was the ability to pivot from a low-privilege account into wider infrastructure control without obvious anomalous activity.

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.
• Trivy supply chain attack 2026: A PAT stolen via a Trivy workflow and a botched rotation let TeamPCP poison Trivy releases and Action tags to steal CI/CD secrets.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Standing privilege is the central machine identity failure mode. This article shows that service accounts and AI agents are not failing because they exist, but because they are allowed to keep broad access after the moment of need has passed. When background identities are treated as permanent infrastructure rather than governed subjects, the organisation creates a reusable lateral movement path. The practitioner takeaway is that standing privilege, not identity volume alone, is the control gap that matters most.

Machine identity governance now has to absorb agentic behaviour. AI agents change the problem because their access is not only persistent, it is also scope-changing at runtime as they chain tools and shift tasks. That means classic assumptions about fixed privilege at provisioning time are collapsing. The implication is that identity programmes must stop treating agents as advanced service accounts and instead govern them as identities whose authority changes as execution changes.

Identity blast radius is becoming the decisive control metric. The article’s real warning is that visibility without containment is not governance. If teams can discover every service account but still allow it to reach domain-admin-adjacent assets, the programme has not reduced risk, only improved inventory. The useful question is no longer whether the identity exists, but how far one compromised identity can travel before enforcement stops it.

Discoverability is no longer enough without runtime enforcement. Shadow AI and hidden service accounts both expose the same structural weakness: identity controls that depend on periodic review arrive too late. The governance model now has to measure whether access can be constrained continuously as the environment changes, not whether a list can be reconciled after the fact. Practitioners should treat policy automation as a core identity governance capability, not an operational convenience.

Service account security and agent security are converging into one programme. The article is a reminder that machine identity, workload identity, and agentic identity cannot be managed as separate silos once they share the same network and the same privilege model. The important distinction is not technical label but control outcome: who or what can reach sensitive assets, and whether that access can be revoked, narrowed, or segmented before lateral movement occurs. Practitioners should align NHI governance, PAM, and network containment around that shared outcome.

From our research library:

• NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 59% of organisations say they lack viable alternatives to standing privileged access for NHIs and AI agents, according to Delinea research.
• Read next: Service Account Security Guide

What this signals

Identity blast radius: the real design problem is not how many NHIs exist, but how far a compromised one can travel before containment stops it. Programmes that inventory service accounts without narrowing reachable assets will keep finding more identities while the same lateral movement path remains open.

AI agent adoption changes the governance bar because these actors can expand scope during execution rather than only at provisioning time. The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey shows 53% of security leaders expect AI to run major portions of their infrastructure autonomously within the next three years, so access controls have to move from static approval to runtime containment, especially where tool use can change mid-task.

Security teams that still separate machine identity controls from agent governance are building two versions of the same blind spot. One side is long-lived service accounts with excessive reach, the other is agentic workflows that inherit access faster than reviews can catch up. The operational answer is to govern both as inventory, privilege, and containment problems at once.

For practitioners

• Map every machine identity to reachable assets Build and maintain an inventory of service accounts, AI agents, tokens, and other NHIs, then record the specific systems each one can reach. Use that map to expose dormant access, overbroad reach, and accounts that have no clear operational owner.
• Down-scope access to observed business need Use a learning period to identify the connections each identity actually uses, then remove entitlements that exceed that behaviour. Preserve only the assets and logon types needed for function, not the access inherited during deployment.
• Apply identity-based restrictions to AI agents Treat each agent as a governed identity with function-scoped access, not ambient trust. Restrict tool use, reachable assets, and privilege inheritance so the agent cannot expand access simply because workflow demands change.
• Automate policy updates as environments change Replace static, IP-centric rules with deterministic policy management that updates when identities, workloads, or network paths change. Keep enforcement tied to identity and behaviour so new connections do not reopen old privilege paths.
• Constrain lateral movement paths explicitly Segment service accounts and agents away from sensitive administration paths, especially where background identities could be reused after compromise. Focus containment on the routes an identity can take, not just on the login event.

Key takeaways

• The article frames standing privilege and poor visibility as the main reason service accounts and AI agents become lateral movement paths.
• It also ties the risk to scale, with machine and service identities now far exceeding human users and AI agent adoption still accelerating.
• The practical implication is to inventory NHIs continuously, narrow reachable assets, and enforce identity-based controls that change as the environment changes.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity (NHI): A digital identity assigned to a non-human entity such as a software application, service account, API key, bot, machine, or AI agent that enables it to authenticate and interact with systems without direct human involvement. NHIs now outnumber human identities in most enterprises by 25 to 50 times.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains active even when no immediate task requires it. For NHI programmes, it is a common failure mode because long-lived credentials and persistent roles create unnecessary exposure. Reducing standing privilege usually means tighter expiry, on-demand access, and clearer review of who or what still needs access.
• Identity Blast Radius: The amount of damage a compromised identity can cause across systems, data, and infrastructure. In NHI environments, it is shaped by permissions, network reach, and administrative capability rather than by the credential alone. Reducing blast radius is a containment strategy that limits lateral movement and data exposure.
• Agentic Identity: An agentic identity is a non-human identity used by an autonomous system that can act, call tools, and access data with execution authority. It needs the same governance discipline as other privileged identities, plus runtime context, ownership mapping, and revocation paths.

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 or identity security programme, it is worth exploring.