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23/06/2026 8:30 pm
TL;DR: Non-human identities power automation across cloud, on-premises, containers, CI/CD, and IoT, but Unosecur argues that their static credentials, weak rotation, and inconsistent governance create breach paths that traditional IAM monitoring often misses. The real security question is no longer whether NHIs exist, but how quickly their blast radius can be contained.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Unosecur: Securing non-human identities, Part 2, understanding the security risks of NHIs and mitigating them
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when NHI credentials are long-lived and hard to monitor?
A: Long-lived NHI credentials create a wide attack window.
Q: Why do service accounts and API keys increase lateral movement risk?
A: They increase lateral movement risk when they carry permissions that are broader than the task they perform.
Q: How should security teams measure whether NHI governance is working?
A: Measure how many machine identities are inventoried, rotated, revoked, and scoped to a clearly defined workload or environment.
Practitioner guidance
- Classify every NHI by trust boundary Map service accounts, API keys, container identities, CI/CD credentials, and IoT certificates to the systems they can reach, then remove broad cross-environment trust that is not operationally required.
- Shorten the lifetime of persistent machine secrets Replace long-lived credentials with time-bounded mechanisms where possible, and enforce rotation for secrets that still must persist across releases or batch jobs.
- Separate machine permissions by function and environment Split production, testing, build, and administrative access so one compromised identity cannot pivot into adjacent systems or shared tooling.
What's in the full article
Unosecur's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Detailed examples of how different NHI types fail across application, service account, cloud key, container, CI/CD, and IoT contexts.
- Vendor-discussed mitigation patterns for rotating, monitoring, and scoping machine credentials in hybrid estates.
- The specific breach examples and source references used by the vendor to support each risk category.
- Additional context on how the article maps these risks into practical security steps for technical teams.
👉 Read Unosecur's analysis of non-human identity security risks and mitigations →
NHI security risks: what IAM teams are missing now?
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25/06/2026 3:35 am
Static machine trust is no longer a safe operating assumption. NHIs that depend on persistent tokens, API keys, and service account secrets turn a single disclosure into an extended exposure window. That model was built for predictable machine behaviour, but modern hybrid estates generate too many paths for secrets to leak, linger, or be reused. Practitioners should treat persistence itself as a governance risk, not just a credential problem.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Which frameworks help teams govern NHI exposure and privilege?
A: OWASP-NHI and NIST CSF are the strongest baseline references for machine identity governance, while zero trust principles help limit trust between systems. Teams should use them to map machine identity ownership, reduce standing access, and verify that lifecycle controls exist across the full estate.
👉 Read our full editorial: NHI security risks are shifting from exposure to blast radius
