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27/06/2026 1:30 pm
TL;DR: Privilege escalation usually succeeds through entitlement gaps such as dormant elevated permissions, over-permissioned service accounts, shadow admin patterns, and entitlement drift, according to Zluri. The real failure is governance, because access reviews, PAM, and least-privilege models often stop short of the full entitlement surface.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance Privilege Escalation in Identity Security
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce privilege escalation risk in identity systems?
A: Start by analysing effective privilege across users, service accounts, and shared credentials.
Q: Why do service accounts increase privilege escalation risk?
A: Service accounts often receive broad permissions so integrations keep working, then remain active long after the original use case ends.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about access reviews and privilege escalation?
A: They often review whether access was once approved instead of whether it still matches present-day need.
Practitioner guidance
- Map effective privilege across the full entitlement estate Review permissions at the combination level so you can see when ordinary grants add up to admin-like control.
- Remove dormant elevated access before it becomes an attack path Identify admin accounts, temporary project grants, and forgotten service account permissions that remain active after the original need has ended.
- Shift access reviews from compliance sign-off to security detection Use review cycles to surface entitlement drift, over-permissioned roles, and shadow admin combinations that create effective privilege.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A deeper breakdown of the five entitlement gap types that create escalation pathways.
- Examples of how access reviews miss effective privilege when permissions combine into shadow admin patterns.
- A practical explanation of why PAM covers only part of the escalation attack surface.
- The article's full argument for how NHI governance changes the escalation problem in real environments.
👉 Read Zluri's analysis of privilege escalation in identity security →
Privilege escalation and governance gaps teams are missing?
Explore further
27/06/2026 2:53 pm
Privilege escalation is a governance failure before it is a technical attack. The article is right to frame escalation as the reuse of access that already exists inside the enterprise. That means the core problem is not discovery of a new exploit, but the persistence of old entitlements that no longer match business need. Practitioners should read this as an identity governance problem that spans human access, NHI scope, and delegated privilege.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to the State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Another finding from The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities shows that 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when privileged access is misused?
A: Accountability should sit with the business owner, the application owner, and the identity governance team together, because escalation risk is created by both access design and lifecycle oversight. If service accounts or privileged roles remain active without review, the programme has a governance failure, not just an incident response problem.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privilege escalation in identity security exposes governance blind spots
