Non-Human Identity Sprawl as an Overlooked Attack Surface
Non-Human Identity Sprawl as an Overlooked Attack Surface
Non-human identities (NHIs) like service accounts, API keys, containers, and increasingly, AI copilots, are multiplying across cloud and hybrid environments. Some NHIs are triggered by user actions, while others operate completely independently. Analysts estimate that non-human identities now outnumber human users by as much as 50 to 1.
As AI adoption accelerates and infrastructure becomes more ephemeral, non-human identity sprawl is fast-becoming one of the most urgent risks facing security teams. It’s critical to prepare your SOC to detect and respond to threats that target NHIs.
What Is NHI Sprawl and Why Is It Exploding?
“Non-human identity sprawl” describes the uncontrolled growth of machine-based credentials in cloud and hybrid environments. These identities don’t sleep, don’t rotate roles, and often fall outside the governance lifecycle used for human accounts. That makes them harder to track, harder to secure, and dangerously easy to overlook.
But NHIs are also essential to how modern infrastructure works:
Cloud-native architectures rely on microservices, each with its own set of credentials for internal communication. A single Kubernetes cluster might generate hundreds of service accounts by design.
CI/CD pipelines spin up temporary environments and deploy automation tools that need access to secrets, artifact stores, and cloud APIs. Many of these leave behind credentials if not cleaned up.
AI agents and robotic process automation (RPA) tools now perform semi-autonomous tasks, such as processing invoices or managing customer queries, requiring persistent access to sensitive data and systems.
Serverless functions and ephemeral workloads create short-lived but highly privileged identities that disappear before most monitoring tools can detect them, yet the tokens they use may persist.
Bottom line: NHIs are woven into the fabric of digital operations. And in fast-moving environments, NHIs accumulate rapidly. A single product team might leave behind dozens of service accounts, secrets, or tokens across environments. Most end up with no clear owner, no expiration date, and no monitoring. Over time, this creates a sprawling, ungoverned identity layer that attackers increasingly target.
Security teams often can’t answer basic questions like
Who created this service account?
What does it have access to?
Is it still in use?
How do we know it’s not being abused?
Who owns it now?
And with AI and automation poised to expand even further, NHI sprawl is only going to increase.
How Attackers Exploit NHI Sprawl
In practice, threat actors exploit NHI sprawl in both the initial access and lateral movement stages of their attacks.
1. Initial Access via Leaked Credentials or Hardcoded Secrets
In many cases, attackers begin by scanning public repositories, S3 buckets, GitHub gists, or developer forums for exposed secrets. A single hardcoded API key or service credential can give direct access to cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, or storage platforms.
Other common attack paths include:
Harvesting secrets from compromised developer endpoints
Targeting build servers (e.g., Jenkins) that store static secrets
Compromising third-party integrations through OAuth tokens or API keys issued to trusted apps. These can be stolen or abused to gain system-level access, especially when those integrations are overly scoped or lack proper token hygiene.
As an example, in September 2025, a high-profile breach exploited the integration between Salesforce Drift and Salesforce, enabling attackers to steal an OAuth token tied to the third-party Drift app. This non-human identity gave programmatic access to Salesforce APIs, resulting in data theft from customer instances.
2. Lateral Movement via Service Account Enumeration
Once inside a network, attackers actively hunt for NHIs with valuable access. They use common indicators like naming conventions, default storage paths, or shared secrets in container images or code repos.
From there, they attempt to:
Reuse valid tokens or credentials
Access internal APIs or resources
Escalate privileges via role assumption or chained services
Bridge from cloud to on-prem by compromising synced service accounts
These movements rarely trigger the kinds of interactive login alerts most SOCs are used to monitoring.
In hybrid environments, attackers often pivot from cloud workloads to internal AD-connected systems by exploiting synced service identities, particularly those with cached credentials or privileged group membership. This cross-environment pivoting is a well-documented tactic in both ransomware and espionage campaigns.
Why Simulation Is Crucial for NHI Defense
Your SOC might not have a clear mental model for how attackers exploit non-human identities. That’s what makes simulation training essential. While many exercises focus on phishing or insider threats involving humans, a growing share of breaches now stem from invisible pathways like unattended service accounts, over-permissioned automation scripts, or compromised OAuth tokens silently traversing cloud environments.
Simulations that model these scenarios help SOC teams build the muscle memory needed to detect and respond before real damage occurs. For example, running a red-team scenario where attackers pivot through a compromised CI/CD token or discover a forgotten cloud service account helps analysts:
Learn the telltale signs of NHI exploitation (e.g., strange API usage, abnormal workload access).
Understand how lateral movement can happen without interactive login activity.
Practice containment strategies that won’t crash critical services (e.g., isolating a Kubernetes service account mid-deployment).
Simulation can also surface broader NHI security blind spots, such as a lack of inventory for service identities, excessive privileges, or unclear ownership of cloud automation credentials. By replaying real-world patterns of abuse (like those used in the Salesforce Drift breach), your SOC can tune its detections and test its response runbooks. You can also use simulations to provide security decision-makers with valuable intelligence that helps them rethink how access is provisioned and monitored across machines, services, and APIs.
In an age where NHIs operate silently in the background, simulation becomes one of the few ways to meaningfully rehearse how things could go wrong.
Cloud Range delivers live-fire, team-based cyber attack simulation exercises that mirror today’s most complex identity-driven threat scenarios – including lateral movement via overprivileged service accounts, credential theft through third-party integrations, and stealthy abuse of automation. These simulations help your SOC teams drill against attack paths that real adversaries often use.
Schedule a Cloud Range demo to see how live-fire simulation strengthens your NHI defenses.
