How can organisations reduce the risk from compromised service accounts and tokens?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Compromised service accounts and tokens rarely fail in one place. They are often reused across CI/CD, cloud control planes, SaaS integrations, and data pipelines, which means a single exposed credential can become an organisation-wide trust problem. Current guidance suggests treating these identities as production assets, not plumbing, because they frequently outlive the workflow they were created for. In The 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity, Entro Security reported that 44% of NHI tokens are exposed in the wild, often through collaboration tools and code commits. That exposure pattern matters because detection without revocation leaves usable access behind.

The practical risk is not just theft, but lateral movement. Once a token is valid, an attacker can query source code, pull images, call cloud APIs, or extract downstream SaaS data before traditional perimeter controls notice. NIST’s NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 emphasises continuous governance, which is exactly what these identities need when they are shared, overprivileged, or forgotten. In practice, many security teams encounter the blast radius only after the token has already been used to pivot, rather than through intentional exposure testing.

How It Works in Practice

Reducing risk starts with making the identity layer visible and enforcing the same discipline used for human access. Inventory every service account, API key, OAuth token, certificate, and other secret, then map each one to an owner, system, purpose, and expiry. The fastest risk reduction usually comes from removing duplication and replacing long-lived static credentials with short TTLs, JIT issuance, and automatic revocation. That is especially important because 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows how often identity compromise is the real event, not the side effect.

• Use RBAC only as a baseline, then narrow privileges with process-specific scopes and explicit approval paths.
• Apply PAM for administrative actions, but do not rely on it alone for machine-to-machine access.
• Prefer workload identity over shared secrets so the workload proves what it is before it receives access.
• Log every token use at the identity layer, including the workload, source, target, and action.
• Revoke credentials automatically when a job completes, a pipeline ends, or ownership changes.

This is also where Anthropic — first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign report is useful: autonomous tooling can chain access faster than human operators expect, so identity controls must evaluate request context in real time. For implementation guidance, many teams pair policy-as-code with OIDC-based workload identity and secret scanners, then validate that one token cannot reach source repositories, cloud resources, and SaaS data from the same trust path. The Salesloft OAuth token breach is a reminder that exposed tokens can become direct data-access paths when scope and rotation are weak. These controls tend to break down when legacy shared accounts are embedded in fragile batch jobs because ownership, expiry, and revocation are difficult to enforce consistently.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter credential controls often increase operational overhead, so organisations have to balance speed against revocation discipline. That tradeoff is real in legacy integrations, third-party connectors, and vendor-managed services where short TTLs or per-task credentials are not yet supported. Best practice is evolving here, and there is no universal standard for every platform, but the direction is clear: reduce standing access wherever the workflow can tolerate it.

One common exception is emergency automation, where teams keep break-glass service accounts for resilience. Those accounts should be isolated, monitored, and excluded from normal workflows rather than treated as ordinary production identities. Another edge case is SaaS integration sprawl, where secrets appear in tickets, docs, and chat as often as they do in code. The Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 both reinforce that governance has to span build systems, collaboration tools, and runtime access. A further caution is that duplicated secrets can hide in multiple stores, so revoking one copy does not always remove the live path. In practice, the most resilient programmes combine inventory, least privilege, JIT issuance, and continuous validation because a single control rarely covers every service account failure mode.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How can organisations reduce the blast radius of compromised agent identities?
• When do service accounts become a higher risk than ordinary user accounts?
• How should teams reduce the risk of orphaned service accounts and stale tokens?
• Why do non-human identities create more audit risk than human accounts?