When unused or over-privileged connections are left in place, attackers gain a larger attack surface and more paths to move laterally. Silent machine credentials can also hide compromised vendor access, making detection slower and remediation harder. The result is weaker control over supply chain risk, data exposure, and unexpected changes in production systems.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Unused and over-privileged non-human connections are not just housekeeping issues. They are durable attack paths: service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, and vendor integrations often outlive the systems or workflows that created them. When those connections are not monitored, they become invisible trust relationships that attackers can reuse for lateral movement, data exfiltration, or quiet persistence. This is exactly the kind of exposure called out in the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10.
The risk is amplified when credentials are scattered across tools and environments. NHIMG notes in The State of Secrets in AppSec that organisations maintain an average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances, which fragments visibility and weakens control over who can still use what. In practice, security teams often discover the problem only after an integration has already been abused, rather than through intentional lifecycle review.
How It Works in Practice
The failure mode usually starts with identity sprawl. A machine identity is created for a pipeline, vendor app, bot, or internal service, then retains access long after its original purpose changes. If monitoring only tracks human logins, security teams miss dormant credentials, stale API keys, and over-broad entitlements that continue to function without obvious user activity. That makes Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks directly relevant: the issue is not simply that secrets exist, but that their usage context decays faster than their access.
Operationally, the control set should cover three things at minimum:
- Inventory every non-human connection, including dormant integrations, CI/CD tokens, and vendor-managed access.
- Map each identity to an owner, business purpose, and expiry date so stale access can be identified quickly.
- Alert on unusual usage patterns such as first-time access, new source locations, privilege escalation, or access outside expected runtime windows.
Where possible, teams should pair monitoring with lifecycle enforcement. The NHI Lifecycle Management Guide is useful here because unused credentials should not merely be observed, they should be retired, rotated, or revoked when ownership or purpose is unclear. This aligns with current guidance from OWASP on treating non-human identities as first-class attack surfaces, not as incidental technical debris. These controls tend to break down in hybrid environments with unmanaged vendor tooling and shadow automation, because ownership, telemetry, and revocation authority are split across teams.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter monitoring often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance visibility against alert fatigue and integration friction. That tradeoff matters because not every unused connection is immediately malicious, and some over-privileged services are hard to refactor without breaking production dependencies.
Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests prioritising the highest-risk cases first: externally reachable connections, vendor credentials, secrets with write or admin rights, and identities that can reach production data. The Top 10 NHI Issues resource is helpful for separating routine cleanup from the controls that most often prevent real incidents. In parallel, teams should distinguish between accounts that are truly unused and those that are merely low-traffic, because the latter may still be critical to batch jobs, failover paths, or emergency automation.
One practical edge case is outsourced or managed service access. Those credentials often look idle until the exact moment a vendor needs them, which means simple inactivity thresholds can create false confidence. In another common case, a connection may be technically active but functionally unnecessary, with privileges far broader than the workflow requires. In both situations, the security outcome is the same: the organisation keeps paying for trust it no longer needs.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10, OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 and CSA MAESTRO address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Covers discovery and inventory of non-human identities and their access paths. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | A-03 | Over-privileged autonomous connections expand agentic attack surface and abuse paths. |
| CSA MAESTRO | I-2 | Identity governance for machine and agent workloads depends on continuous control over access. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Identity and access management requires tracking and limiting non-human privileges. |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | AI governance calls for accountability and monitoring around automated system access. |
Review machine identities regularly and remove excessive permissions before they become persistent risk.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- What breaks when organisations fail to govern sensitive data and non-human identities together?
- When do non-human identities pose the greatest risk to organizations?
- Why do non-human identities create more risk than many human accounts?
- Why do non-human identities create more remediation risk than many human accounts?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on August 27, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
