TL;DR: Traditional PAM strategies still rely on standing privileges, manual rotation, and visibility gaps that attackers can turn into ransomware footholds, according to Infisical’s analysis. The real shift is from managing permanent access to removing persistent privilege and making credentials invisible to users.
At a glance
What this is: This is a PAM best-practices analysis that says standing credentials, manual workflows, and exposed technical access no longer match how attackers move through modern environments.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM and PAM teams need to govern privileged access across humans, service accounts, API keys, and workloads as one control problem, not as separate exceptions.
Context
Privileged access management is the discipline of controlling who or what can perform high-risk actions in production systems. In this article, the core governance gap is that many teams still treat privileged access as a human admin problem, even though service accounts, API keys, machine identities, and technical users now carry the same blast radius.
Infisical's analysis argues that standing privilege, exposed credentials, and manual rotation create avoidable access paths for attackers. The practical issue is not just leakage but persistence: once privileged access is always on, it becomes harder to govern, harder to detect, and easier to abuse across cloud and hybrid environments.
For IAM practitioners, the question is how to move from permanent entitlements to task-scoped privilege without breaking operations. That is where PAM, secrets management, and workload identity governance now overlap.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when privileged access is not continuously governed?
A: When privileged access is not continuously governed, standing privilege persists, dormant accounts remain usable, and the attack surface expands across human and machine identities. In practice, that creates a larger blast radius for credential theft and a weaker ability to prove who had access, when, and why. The result is operational drift, not just security exposure.
Q: What problem does ownership attribution solve for service accounts and API keys?
A: It closes the gap between exposure detection and accountable remediation. Many organisations can find the secret, but not the human who introduced it, maintains it, or can safely replace it. Ownership attribution gives security teams a practical way to assign action without relying on informal knowledge that disappears during staff changes.
Q: How do security teams know whether PAM is actually reducing privilege risk?
A: Measure how much privileged access is permanent, how often elevation is task-scoped, and whether session activity matches the approved purpose. If privileged sessions still last far beyond the task or if approvals are routinely broad, PAM is reducing friction more than risk.
Q: Should organisations treat technical users as privileged by default?
A: Yes, when those users can reach production, modify configuration, or access sensitive data. The governance mistake is limiting PAM to classic admin accounts while leaving developers, contractors, SaaS super users, and workload identities outside the same control discipline.
Technical breakdown
Why standing privilege creates an always-on attack surface
Standing privilege means access is granted persistently rather than only when a task requires it. In practical terms, that leaves administrative rights, service account permissions, and technical-user access available long after the original need has passed. The result is an expanded attack surface because compromise of any one of those identities can unlock broad system reach without needing another approval or re-authentication step. This is especially risky when access is stored in spreadsheets, vaults, or manually managed exceptions, because governance drifts away from actual system state. In modern environments, the problem is not just who has privilege, but how long that privilege remains usable.
Practical implication: inventory every permanent privileged path and separate business need from persistent entitlement.
How JIT access changes PAM control mechanics
Just-in-time access changes PAM from a static permission model into an issuance model. Instead of granting rights up front and hoping they are revoked later, the system grants access only for a defined task, time window, and approval condition. That reduces exposure because the credential or entitlement exists for a shorter period and often only in a session-brokered form. For technical users, the governance value is not only tighter scope but also better auditability, because the access event becomes tied to a specific request and purpose. This shifts the control point from review-after-the-fact to issuance-before-use.
Practical implication: place the highest-risk administrative and production tasks behind JIT access first.
Why credential visibility is still a governance failure
Credential visibility creates its own risk because any human who can view, copy, or reuse a secret can also leak it, share it, or leave it exposed in code and logs. That is why session brokering, credential injection, and certificate-based authentication matter: they let users perform work without directly handling the underlying secret. In NHI terms, the control goal is not only rotation but reducing human exposure to machine credentials in the first place. This matters most for service accounts and API keys, where the credential often outlives the person or workflow that first used it.
Practical implication: remove secret exposure from user workflows instead of relying on training alone.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker aims to turn one privileged foothold into broad operational control that can support ransomware, disruption, or data theft.
- Entry begins when attackers find a forgotten service account, an over-privileged user, or an exposed API key that still grants production access.
- Credential access follows because standing privilege and visible secrets provide usable access without needing a fresh compromise chain.
- Escalation occurs when that access reaches broader systems, enabling command execution, data access, or lateral movement across the environment.
- Impact is achieved when the attacker uses privileged reach to deploy ransomware, disrupt operations, or exfiltrate sensitive data.
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.
- Kubeflow cryptomining attacks 2020: Exposed Kubeflow dashboards and a notebook's mounted Kubernetes service account let attackers run cryptominers on tens of ML clusters.
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 now the governance flaw, not just an implementation weakness: Permanent access assumes the need for privilege is stable and observable over time. That assumption breaks when attackers can exploit long-lived credentials faster than teams can review them. The implication is that PAM must be judged by how much persistent access still exists, not by how many approvals a process has.
Credential visibility creates trust debt in privileged workflows: If a person can see a credential, the organisation has already accepted avoidable exposure. That exposure may be operationally convenient, but it also expands the number of places where secrets can leak, be reused, or be mishandled. The practitioner conclusion is that visibility itself is a governance decision, not just a user experience detail.
Privileged access is now a cross-identity control problem: The same policy discipline has to cover human admins, service accounts, API keys, and machine identities. Treating each of those as separate governance tracks leaves gaps where attackers move from one identity form to another. Practitioners need a single privileged access model that spans all high-risk identities, not parallel exceptions.
Ephemeral privilege window: This article points to a control model where access exists only for the shortest possible task window and leaves no standing entitlement behind. That matters because it changes the unit of governance from account ownership to access issuance. The practical conclusion is that privilege should be governed as a time-bound event, not as a permanent attribute.
Modern PAM is collapsing the old distinction between humans and technical identities: The same high-risk access assumptions now apply to developers, service accounts, and workloads. Traditional PAM only for named admins misses the identities that actually create the widest attack surface. The practitioner takeaway is that privileged access policy has to follow risk, not job title.
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.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Read next: Top 10 NHI Issues
What this signals
Ephemeral privilege window: The control shift is not just from passwords to better tooling, but from permanent entitlement to task-scoped issuance. Teams that still rely on standing credentials should expect their PAM programme to be measured by how much access can disappear before it ever becomes broadly usable.
Credential injection and session brokering are becoming governance controls, not convenience features, because they reduce how often humans handle secrets directly. That changes the design target for PAM, especially where developers and operators still interact with production through shared credentials or vault checkouts.
For practitioners
- Audit all standing privileged access Map permanent admin rights, service account entitlements, API key reach, and any technical-user access that persists beyond a single task.
- Move high-risk systems to just-in-time access Start with production administration, break-glass paths, and any access that can modify security controls, then require task-scoped expiry for each elevation.
- Remove direct secret exposure from users Use credential injection, session brokering, and certificate-based access so operators do not handle the underlying secret in routine workflows.
- Expand PAM coverage to technical identities Apply the same privileged access rules to service accounts, API keys, cloud admins, and SaaS super users that you already apply to human administrators.
- Automate revocation and recertification Tie access expiry, review, and revocation to workflow triggers so dormant privilege does not survive role changes or abandoned projects.
Key takeaways
- Standing privilege remains the main weakness in traditional PAM because it keeps high-risk access alive long after the original business need has passed.
- The article links privileged identity exposure to ransomware, service account misuse, and broader attack paths across production systems.
- The clearest control change is to make privilege task-scoped, secret exposure minimal, and revocation automatic when work ends.
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 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 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 focuses on excessive standing privilege across privileged identities and technical users. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | It criticises long-lived credentials, manual rotation, and exposed secrets in privileged workflows. | |
| Recommendation — Reduce standing access by enforcing least-privilege privilege models for every high-risk non-human identity. Replace long-lived credentials with short-lived access and rotate or revoke secrets on a task basis. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Credential rotation and revocation are central themes in the PAM guidance. |
| AC-6 — Least Privilege | The post argues for task-scoped access and minimal necessary permissions. | |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management controls to shorten credential lifetimes and revoke stale privileged access. Enforce least privilege so elevated rights exist only for the specific task and duration required. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The article spans privileged account inventory, review, and revocation across technical identities. |
| Recommendation — Centralise account management to inventory, review, and remove unnecessary privileged access paths. | ||
Key terms
- 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.
- Just-in-Time Access Request: Just-in-Time Access Request is a pattern that grants access only when it is needed and only for the duration required. It reduces standing privilege by making access temporary, policy driven, and task scoped. This approach is especially useful for contractors, sensitive systems, and short-lived operational work.
- Credential Injection: Credential injection is the controlled replacement of one credential with another at execution time, usually before a request leaves the host or service boundary. It lets the workload operate with a harmless token or placeholder while the real secret remains protected by infrastructure.
- Break-Glass Account: An emergency credential used when normal access paths fail or become unavailable. These accounts are essential for recovery, but they are also high risk because they often bypass standard workflows, so they need tight vaulting, strong authentication, dual control, and continuous monitoring.
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Published by the NHIMG editorial team on July 8, 2026.
Updated on October 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org