Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
12/07/2026 12:24 pm
TL;DR: Bot and API credentials are often hard-coded, over-privileged, and difficult to monitor, making them a primary path for lateral movement and data exfiltration according to Securden’s analysis. The governance gap is not storage alone, but whether lifecycle, rotation, and least privilege are enforced across the full non-human identity estate.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Securden: securing bot credentials and API identities with unified identity security
By the numbers:
- Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern service accounts and API keys across cloud platforms?
A: Treat them as lifecycle-managed identities, not static credentials.
Q: Why do hardcoded secrets create such a large security risk?
A: Hardcoded secrets turn source code, build output, and configuration files into credential repositories, which makes exposure easy to repeat and difficult to contain.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about secrets management for non-human identities?
A: They often treat vaulting as if it solves identity assurance, when it really only stores the credential.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every bot and API credential Create a complete register of secrets, service accounts, and workload identities across source code, pipelines, endpoints, and cloud platforms.
- Centralise runtime secret retrieval Move credentials out of code and developer workstations into a managed vault so applications fetch them at runtime.
- Enforce least privilege on machine identities Review every non-human account against its actual job function, then remove broad access that was granted for convenience.
What's in the full article
Securden's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Platform-level comparison of vaulting, PAM, and lifecycle management across human and non-human identities
- Implementation checklist for runtime secret retrieval, rotation cadence, and decommissioning workflows
- Reference architecture showing how API gateways, SIEM, and machine identities fit together
- Feature comparison table covering deployment time, total cost of ownership, and scale
👉 Read Securden's analysis of bot credentials and API identity security →
Bot credentials and API identities: what IAM teams need now?
Explore further
12/07/2026 12:37 pm
Unified identity controls are now the baseline for NHI governance, not an optimisation. The article is directionally correct that secrets management and PAM cannot remain separate silos when bots, scripts, and APIs all use credentials to reach production. A vault without lifecycle control leaves privilege unresolved, while PAM without secrets governance leaves exposure unresolved. Practitioners should treat this as a single non-human identity control plane problem, not two adjacent tools.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system, according to The 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- 54% of organisations are dissatisfied with their current secrets management solution because not all secrets are secured, and 43% cite lack of central management.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when credential compromise leads to lateral movement?
A: Accountability usually spans identity, endpoint, and application owners, because the failure is rarely a single control. Governance should assign ownership for credential assurance, privileged access scope, and revocation speed so that no one assumes the other team will contain the blast radius.
👉 Read our full editorial: NHI governance needs unified secrets and PAM controls at scale
