Improving PAM: Expanding Coverage and Strengthening Access Control

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/working-towards-improved-pam-widening-the-scope-and-taking-control/?utm_source=nhimg

Privileged Access Management (PAM) has long focused on human administrators, but attackers increasingly exploit non-human identities (NHIs)—service accounts, APIs, workloads, and automation tools. Leaving these out of PAM creates blind spots that compromise security and audit compliance.

Recent guidance from Mandiant and Google reinforces the importance of including NHIs in PAM programs and provides a four-level maturity model: uninitiated, ad-hoc, repeatable, and iterative optimization. Teams can use this framework to benchmark their current practices and plan incremental improvements.

GitGuardian supports organizations in achieving these objectives by providing full visibility into NHIs and secret usage, both inside and outside vaults, enabling safer secrets management and accelerated PAM maturity.

Start With Knowing Your NHIs

Mandiant defines a privileged account as “any human or non-human identity whose entitlements can change system state.”

NHIs often present higher risks than human accounts because:

• They tend to be long-lived.
• They rarely use multi-factor authentication (MFA).
• Anomalous behavior is harder to detect than with human users.

Before implementing Zero Standing Privileges or Just-In-Time (JIT) access, teams need to answer critical questions:

• Which NHIs exist in my environment?
• What critical resources do they access?
• What would happen if access were revoked?

GitGuardian’s NHI Governance and Secrets Security platform helps teams discover and track secrets wherever they exist—whether in code repositories, messaging systems (Slack, Jira, Confluence), or vaults—providing visibility into both plaintext exposures and managed secrets.

Automating Rotation Requires Cross-Vault Insight

Achieving repeatable PAM maturity involves rotating shared credentials across all systems. However, rotation is only effective if all instances of a secret are accounted for, not just those in one vault.

GitGuardian’s NHI Governance platform inventories secrets across multiple vaults, linking them to identities, usage paths, and IAM/CI tools. This enables teams to:

• Verify all instances are rotated.
• Ensure credentials are used by the right entities.
• Monitor access consistently across cloud, AI, and on-prem environments.

Operational Goals: Zero Trust and JIT Access

Mandiant recommends:

“Human standing privilege trends toward zero; service/API identities move to group Managed Service Account (gMSA)/managed identities.”

To achieve this, organizations should:

• Identify which human and non-human identities access mission-critical systems.
• Establish baselines for inventory, criticality, and tiering.
• Shift from long-lived, overprivileged keys to ephemeral, identity-bound access.

GitGuardian supports this shift by combining:

1. Secret discovery outside vaults to stop leaks at the source.
2. Insights into vaulted secrets to ensure proper management.
3. Push-to-Vault capabilities to remediate exposed secrets efficiently.

Shifting Left on Credential Exposure

Reacting to compromised accounts is insufficient. GitGuardian encourages early detection of plaintext credentials:

• Real-time alerts for secrets exposed in code, documentation, or messaging platforms.
• Early warning canaries via Honeytokens—decoy credentials that reveal malicious activity before actual compromise.

This proactive approach allows teams to rotate, revoke, or isolate secrets before attackers exploit them, closing the gap between exposure and remediation.

Operational Readiness: Harden Your Tactical Stance

Mandiant emphasizes the importance of preparation:

“Map every service account to owner and workload, run continuous discovery cycles to find systems and credentials, onboard all human and non-human privileged identities into PAM; enforce unique credentials, MFA, and API-based rotation.”

GitGuardian enables organizations to:

• Establish a baseline of all NHIs and their privileges.
• Correlate secrets and access across systems for better auditability.
• Respond rapidly to exposures with automated rotation and remediation.

Conclusion

The path to PAM maturity is clear: widen the scope to include NHIs, gain complete visibility, and implement proactive secret governance.

Vaults and traditional PAM controls are not enough. Organizations must detect leaks at the source, rotate credentials dynamically, and enforce least privilege across humans and machines alike.

With GitGuardian, teams can move from uninitiated or ad-hoc PAM levels toward iterative optimization, ensuring that privileged credentials are managed safely, securely, and proactively before attackers can exploit them.

Next steps: inventory your NHIs, map secrets, and adopt tools that combine discovery, governance, and automated remediation. Visibility is the first step toward true Zero Standing Privileges and PAM excellence.