Imagine an attacker wanted to access your systems tomorrow. Would they bother phishing one of your employees? Probably not. The easier route is to grab a key your software left lying around. With no password to crack and no MFA prompt in the way, they just find a credential and walk in.
Such credentials mostly belong to a non-human identity (NHI). These are the bits of software that log in instead of people: an app talking to a database, a script calling an API, a pipeline shipping code, an AI agent doing tasks. Instead of a password, each one holds a secret such as an API key, a token, or a certificate, and that secret is what proves its identity.
In enterprise environments, a report shows that non-human identities now outnumber people by about 144 to 1, and most of them were created in a hurry and then forgotten. So, the real question is not whether you have NHI risk, because you already do. It is which risks to tackle first.
Such numbers did not build up by accident, and how they grew is worth understanding. The cloud broke big apps into lots of small services that each need an identity, automation now creates credentials on its own, and AI agents are the newest type, creating access faster than anyone can track. Machines now multiply at software speed while we still manage them at human speed, and that mismatch is exactly where non-human identity risk takes hold.
A Closer Look at Each Risk
These risks are well known in the industry. OWASP lists the ten most important ones in its 2025 Non-Human Identities Top 10, and we will cover all ten in the same order. Each section explains the risk and what to do about it.
Improper Offboarding
An orphaned NHI is one that is still present but no longer needed. A project wraps up, a service gets retired, or the person who created it leaves, and the credential just keeps working with nobody watching it. This is more common than you would think: research found that 91 percent of former-employee tokens were still active.
Attackers target these identities precisely because no one is monitoring them. The fix is to make shutdown automatic, so retiring a service also retires its identities. Give every NHI a named owner and run a regular cleanup to switch off anything that is no longer doing a job.
Secret Leakage
A secret leaks when a token, key, or certificate ends up somewhere it should not, the classic example being hard-coded straight into source code. It also slips into configuration files, log output, and the occasional chat message or support ticket. One study of real environments found that 44 percent of tokens were sitting exposed in places like code commits, tickets, and chat tools.
The scary part is that no clever exploit is needed. Whoever finds the secret can just use it. This has hit well-known companies too, not just small teams. So, keep secrets out of code entirely and store them in a vault or secrets manager. Scan your repositories and logs for anything exposed, and rotate whatever might have been seen. Even better, get rid of the long-lived secret altogether, which we cover in the Long-Lived Secrets section below.
Vulnerable Third-Party NHI
Modern development runs on outside tools: SaaS apps, IDE extensions, integrations. Each tool usually gets its own NHI with access into your systems. That is handy, but it also means a weakness in someone else’s software can quietly become your problem. If a third-party tool gets hacked or ships a bad update, attackers can gain access to your environment right away. That is how a lot of supply-chain attacks start.
You cannot fix someone else’s code, but you can limit the damage. Keep a list of every third-party integration, check the reach of each integration, scope those grants down to the minimum, and cut off the ones you no longer use.
Insecure Authentication
Every NHI must authenticate to the service it connects to before it is granted access. Many applications still rely on weak or outdated mechanisms for this, such as legacy protocols or static shared secrets that are easy to intercept. When the authentication mechanism is weak, an attacker can impersonate the identity or escalate its privileges undetected.
The answer is to retire the old methods and use strong, standards-based methods instead. When properly set up, OAuth, mutual TLS, and short-lived certificate-based identities are all far more secure than a legacy shared password that never changes.
Overprivileged NHI
This one is almost everywhere. An overprivileged NHI simply has more access than its job needs. It is so common that one study found 97 percent of NHIs carry excessive privileges. It happens for a reason: granting broad access is the fastest way to make something work, and nobody goes back to limit it later.
This is crucial because it decides how bad a breach can be. If an attacker steals a tightly scoped identity, the damage stays small. If an over-permissioned one is stolen, the attacker inherits all that extra reach, and a minor slip becomes a major incident. Apply the principle of least privilege by giving each NHI only the access it needs and audit those permissions periodically to remove what is no longer used.
Insecure Cloud Deployment Configurations
CI/CD pipelines require access to your cloud environment to build, test, and deploy code automatically. The risk arises when that access is configured with static credentials, which can leak through repositories, build logs, or configuration files. A compromised pipeline credential carries severe impact, granting an attacker lasting, privileged access straight to production.
The better pattern is to skip static credentials and use OpenID Connect (OIDC) instead. With OIDC, the pipeline uses its verified identity to obtain a short-lived token, so there is no standing secret to steal. Validate the token’s claims carefully, ensuring that only the workloads you intend can gain access.
Long-Lived Secrets
A long-lived secret is a credential that rarely expires. Teams end up with these because manually rotating credentials is difficult, so they set a key once and move on. The problem is what happens when one gets stolen. Because the credential never expires, the attacker can keep using it for as long as they like. A key leaked two years ago can remain valid and exploitable today.
The fix is to make secrets short-lived. Instead of a static key, hand out credentials that are generated on demand and expire in minutes or hours. Certificate and key lifecycle managers do this automatically, and short-lived certificates do the same job for machine-to-machine connections. The shorter the lifetime, the smaller the window an attacker ever gets.
Environment Isolation
Good practice is to keep your development, testing, and production environments separate. This risk shows up when the same identity is reused across environments, especially between test and production. Test environments are typically the least protected, so when they share an identity with production, a compromise on the weaker test side can extend directly into production.
Enforce strict separation between environments. Provision separate identities and secrets for development, testing, and production, then store them apart. Do not share credentials across environments, so a test credential can never reach the production environment.
NHI Reuse
NHI reuse happens when the same identity or secret is shared across different applications, services, or components, often because creating a separate identity for each workload takes effort. The convenience is risky. If that one identity is compromised in a single place, an attacker can use the same credentials to reach every other system that relies on it, so a small breach quickly turns into a wide one.
Give each workload its own dedicated identity and secret, so any compromise stays contained to a single service. Track which identity belongs to which application, avoid sharing credentials between components, and rotate them independently. Distinct identities also make it far easier to revoke access for one service without disrupting the rest.
Human Use of NHI
Human use of NHI occurs when a person uses a non-human identity, such as a service account or API token, to perform manual tasks that should run under their own account. It is easy because the service account often already has broad access. Because most platforms cannot differentiate a human from a workload using the same identity, their activity looks effectively identical. The result is elevated privileges in human hands, a weak audit trail, and actions that are hard to attribute when something goes wrong.
Keep human and non-human identities separate. Give people their own accounts with suitable roles for manual and maintenance work and reserve NHIs for automated processes. Monitor how non-human identities are used so that human activity stands out and apply context-aware access controls that flag or block a person signing in as a service account.
We have now walked through every non-human identity risk, from leaked secrets to people relying on machine identities for manual tasks. It is a lot to take in at once, so it helps to step back and look at them together.
Did You Notice the Pattern?
Reviewing the ten risks together reveals a clear pattern. They are not really ten separate problems. They are the same three habits showing up in different outfits: secrets that live too long, identities with too much access, and identities nobody ever cleans up. Leaked secrets, static keys, overprivileged accounts, and orphaned accounts all echo the same handful of root problems.
You do not need ten different tools. You need a few solid habits applied everywhere: know what you have, keep access tight, keep credentials short-lived, and switch things off when they are done. And if you want a place to start that knocks out several of these at once, look at your certificates. Certificates are machine identities you already operate by the thousand, sitting right in the middle of this list. If you leave them alone, they turn long-lived, trigger outages when they expire unnoticed, and pile up faster than anyone can track manually.
Get them under control and you quietly close out a big share of your NHI risk. Managing that at scale is more than a manual job, which is exactly where a purpose-built platform proves its value.
How Encryption Consulting Can Help
Getting your certificates in order is the simplest way to reduce a lot of NHI risk quickly, and Encryption Consulting is here to help with its CertSecure Manager.
One of the biggest obstacles in certificate lifecycle management is visibility. Many organizations lack a complete inventory of their certificates, making it difficult to identify ownership, monitor expiration dates, or assess risk. Our CertSecure Manager handles this by continuously discovering certificates across cloud services, servers, applications, load balancers, and other enterprise systems, helping organizations surface and manage previously unknown certificates. This reduces the number of unknown or unmanaged certificates that often become operational blind spots.
Once discovered, certificates are consolidated into a centralized inventory that provides a single view of certificate status, ownership, location, and lifecycle information. This makes it easier for security and operations teams to understand what certificates exist, who is responsible for them, and when action is required.
To help organizations manage increasing renewal volumes, our platform supports automated renewal workflows that reduce manual effort and streamline certificate replacement. By automating lifecycle processes, organizations can lower the risk of renewal-related outages and reduce the administrative burden on internal teams.
The platform also provides expiration risk monitoring with proactive alerts and notifications for certificates approaching expiration. This allows teams to focus on fixing issues before they impact services.
As certificate lifetimes move toward 47 days, scalability becomes increasingly important. Our platform is built to support large and growing certificate inventories across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, helping organizations preserve visibility and control even as certificate activity increases significantly.
By combining discovery, visibility, monitoring, and automation, our platform provides a practical approach to managing certificates in an environment where manual certificate lifecycle management is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
And if you want to step back and look at the bigger picture, Encryption Consulting also offers Encryption Advisory Services. The team can assess where you stand today and help shape a clear strategy and roadmap, so your entire machine identity and encryption program moves forward together. CertSecure Manager helps you in certificate lifecycle management, and Encryption Advisory Services shapes the broader strategy around it.
Conclusion
Non-human identities are now the largest group in your environment, and the ten risks above are the ones attackers tend to reach for first. The good news is that they all trace back to a few root habits, so you can prioritise rather than attempt to address everything at once.
You do not need to tackle everything at once. A practical place to start is retiring the identities that nobody uses anymore, because they are the easiest gap to close. Next, take your secrets out of source code and keep them in a vault where they are rotated on a regular schedule. Once that is in place, tighten any access that goes beyond what the work genuinely requires. Bringing your certificates under control is the highest-leverage move of all, because it clears several of these risks in one go. If you would like expert help with that step, we can show you how CertSecure Manager discovers, renews, and governs every certificate in your environment.
