8 Key Risks of Non-Human Identities: From Data Breaches to Credential Stuffing

You’ve probably spent years securing human identities, employees, contractors, and admins. But there’s a growing blind spot: Non-human identities (NHIs).

Every application, microservice, API, and automated process running in your environment has an identity. They run your CI/CD pipelines, access sensitive data, and connect systems behind the scenes. These identities often hold powerful privileges that are difficult to manage without visibility and the right tools. 

Service accounts are involved in 62% of cloud breaches, and bad actors leverage compromised machine identities in lateral movement and privilege escalation attacks. With each data breach costing $4.88 million, you can’t afford to let the risks of NHIs linger in your cloud environments.

What are non-human identities, and why do they pose a threat?

Non-human identities (NHIs) are digital credentials assigned to software, services, and devices, such as API keys, service accounts, and bots, that interact with systems without human involvement. They’re essential for automation, integration, and deployment across modern development workflows.

Unlike human accounts, NHIs are often created programmatically, reused across systems, and rarely deleted. They usually rely on tokens, certificates, or access keys for authentication, and often hold elevated, persistent permissions.

Because they typically bypass standard onboarding, offboarding, and auditing processes, NHIs can accumulate stale privileges and shadow access. Once compromised, they may provide direct access to sensitive systems, making them a growing cybersecurity risk.

Aspect	Human Identities	Non-Human Identities
Identity type	A real person accessing systems and applications	A digital entity often operating without direct human intervention
Authentication method	Username/password, MFA, biometrics	API keys, secrets, certificates
Access review & scope	Periodically assessed, with privileges often constrained by role	Usually granted with high privileges
Visibility	Detectable via user behavior analysis	Often silent and anomalous behaviors are harder to detect
Risk profile	Subject to phishing and social engineering	Subject to compromised credentials, supply chain attacks, lateral movement
Lifecycle management	Governed by policies for onboarding, role changes	Often lacks formal lifecycle controls

5 Most Common Types of Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities come in many forms. If you are working in a cloud-native, DevOps-driven environment, you are already managing hundreds of NHIs, including:

1. API keys: Tokens used to establish secure communication between applications and ensure that only authorized entities gain access to APIs.

2. Service accounts: Privileged specialized accounts used by applications or services to access other systems like databases, message queues, or internal tools.

3. DevOps tools: DevOps tools like Jenkins, GitHub, and GitLab use secrets and tokens to automate CI/CD pipelines and deploy applications.

4. Robotic process automation (RPA) bots: Software robots that mimic human actions and automate repetitive, rule-based tasks such as data entry, report generation, and payment processing.

5. Cloud workload identities: NHIs like IAM roles that facilitate access to cloud resources and often operate at scale with wide-reaching access.

8 Key Risks of Non-Human Identities

1. Excessive Permissions

Granting only the necessary permissions for an identity to operate in an environment is a core cybersecurity principle. Especially when introducing new NHIs into a system, developers grant them default or overly permissive privileges during setup. It’s convenient but also dangerous, as these identities carry permissions far beyond what they need to function.

This risk also violates the principle of least privilege. If an attacker finds their way in, they can exploit the excessive permissions to cause significant damage, extract data, or shut down services.

Excessive permissions were the cause of the Microsoft OAuth application compromise in January 2024. The OAuth application acted as a non-human identity with elevated permissions, which, when compromised, facilitated broader access to internal systems. This breach demonstrated how NHIs, like OAuth applications, can be leveraged for lateral movement and emphasized the need for strict access controls and monitoring.

How to prevent it:

• Enforce the least privilege by assigning only the minimum required permissions to NHIs.
• Regularly audit whether granted permissions are actually used.
• Enable Just-In-Time (JIT) access.

2. Credential Stuffing

Credential stuffing is an attack mechanism where attackers compile massive databases of compromised credentials and reuse them across different services to gain access to NHIs with weak or reused secrets. Attackers gather these credentials from various sources, including previous data breaches, public source codes with exposed secrets, exposed configuration files, and dark web marketplaces.

If an attacker compromises an NHI, they can potentially exploit the permissions granted to the NHI to manipulate your data or software supply chain for personal gain or sell the credentials to other malicious parties.

How to prevent it:

• Use token or certificate-based authentication.
• Integrate secret vaults and rotate credentials regularly.

3. API Abuse

API abuse is a high risk when managing NHIs, as API keys typically contain complete access to services or systems. Exploitation of a poorly managed key can lead to mass data leaks and service disruptions.

For instance, the BeyondTrust Remote Support SaaS breach in December 2024 is a recent case of API abuse. Through a compromised API key (CVE-2024-12356), attackers were able to change local application passwords and gain unauthorized access.

How to prevent it:

• Implement strict API key scoping and rate limiting.
• Monitor usage patterns for anomalies.
• Rotate API keys and enforce expiration policies.

4. Hardcoded or Embedded Credentials

In many instances, developers hardcode secrets and access keys associated with NHIs into scripts, containers, and configuration files. If the repository or container image is public (or made public at a later point), anyone and everyone can easily impersonate NHIs using the exposed credentials.

How to prevent it:

• Scan the code and configuration files for secrets before deploying.
• Never store credentials in plain text.
• Use dynamic, ephemeral secrets managed by a secure, centralized system.

5. Orphaned or Abandoned Identities

When projects end, applications are deprecated, and services are decommissioned. But, NHIs often get left behind (stale/dormant NHIs) and remain active with unnecessary or escalated privileges. This risk also happens when the original owner leaves, and the associated NHIs stay active without a new owner (orphaned NHIs) instead of being offboarded.

These abandoned identities become perfect backdoors for attackers to sneak in, as no one is watching them. It can result in lateral movement and even ex-employees exploiting unrevoked credentials to access data.

How to prevent it:

• Tag NHIs with ownership metadata for better management and accountability.
• Review all associated NHIs and offboard no longer needed ones when an employee, application, or service retires.
• Use lifecycle automation to expire unused accounts.

6. Lack of Visibility and Inventory 

Losing track of many NHIs when working with large, containerized, multi-cloud environments is easy. Such systems usually contain hundreds, if not thousands, of NHIs, making it hard to track what they are doing and what permissions they carry.

The main complication with poor visibility is that if you can’t see it, you can’t secure it. As a result, unknown NHIs become unmanaged liabilities.

How to prevent it:

• Maintain a centralized, real-time inventory of all NHIs.
• Audit permissions and activity regularly.

7. Poor Credential Rotation or Long-Lived Secrets

Static credentials, especially those that last indefinitely or expire too far in the future, are common for NHIs. Even though they are convenient, they pose a significant security risk given the increased vulnerability window, and sometimes, DevOps teams lack the tooling and automation necessary to fix them efficiently.

Once exposed, long-lived secrets effectively act as access points that an attacker can exploit to invade your infrastructure without any time constraints. A dangerous example of the inadequately securing or rotating non-human credentials is the 2024 Internet Archive Zendesk token exposure. Attackers exploited unrotated API keys and Zendesk tokens to access approximately 800,000 support tickets from the Internet Archive.

How to prevent it:

• Rotate credentials frequently. Automatically, if possible.
• Use short-lived, scoped tokens and certificates.
• Enforce zero trust principles.

8. Shared NHIs Across Environments

Many organizations utilize isolated environments, such as testing, staging, and production, to ensure that issues in one environment do not affect others. However, some developers reuse the same NHIs across multiple environments for simplicity and cost reduction.

Consequently, even when an NHI associated with a low-risk environment gets compromised, it also contains permissions that an attacker can use to access sensitive production data.

How to prevent it:

• Use separate NHIs for each environment.
• Implement access controls with environment-specific scoping.

Additional Security Strategies to Combat the Risks of Non-Human Identities

Protecting against risks of non-human identities is not a one-time audit but a continuous strategy. We’ve already discussed the fundamentals—here’s the recap:

• Implementing strict access controls: Ensuring NHIs have only the permissions necessary for their function.
• Regularly rotating credentials: Preventing long-lived credentials from becoming vulnerabilities.
• Monitoring and auditing NHIs: Keeping track of non-human identities to detect and respond to suspicious activities promptly.
• Applying the principle of least privilege: Limiting NHIs to the minimal access required to perform their tasks.
• Prioritizing API security: Implementing robust API security best practices for all non-human interactions.

Plus, you can take NHI security a step further by:

• Enforcing lifecycle policies that revoke credentials when they are no longer needed.
• Regularly scanning for anomalies in NHI behavior and API usage patterns.
• Implementing Just-In-Time (JIT) access.

JIT is a powerful yet underutilized security mechanism in IAM that grants temporary access on demand and revokes it immediately afterward to shrink the attack surface and time-to-exploit. If you are looking forward to implementing JIT effectively within an IAM framework, that’s where Apono comes in.

Apono automates the JIT access flow across your entire stack and enables on-demand, self-serviced, granular permissions for just the right amount of time directly from Slack, Teams, or your CLI.

Take Control of Your NHIs With Apono

Non-human identities are rapidly expanding, posing a significant and often unseen risk to your organization’s security. Unmanaged, they can broaden your attack surface, leading to breaches that impact everything. The good news is, you don’t have to face this challenge alone.

Apono’s cloud-native access management platform is built precisely to tackle the complexities of NHI security. It automates the discovery and right sizing of permissions, ensuring that your applications, services, and bots get exactly the access they need and only the access they need. This powerful approach eliminates dangerous standing privileges across all of your identities and helps you enforce Zero Trust and least privilege principles at scale. 

With features like automated, self-service access from Slack, Teams, or your CLI and auto-expiring permissions, Apono ensures your DevOps and security teams can scale safely and efficiently, turning risky standing access to a just-in-time and just-enough model.

Learn more about Apono’s support for both human and non-human identities.
Get a demo to see Apono in action today!