Securing Non-Human Identities: A Modern Approach

Non-Human Identities (NHIs), which include programmatic access credentials such as API keys and service accounts, have become the second most frequent and costliest attack vector. They now outnumber human employees by 92 to 1.

Originally created by development teams to enable functionality, these critical credentials often exist outside the visibility or control of security teams, forming a vast and silent attack surface.

This hidden risk is catastrophic. Exposed NHIs give adversaries an ideal entry point for lateral movement, and because they rarely have security monitoring or behavioral baselines, breaches can persist undetected for months. The LastPass breach is a prime example. It began with an exposed NHI and led to multiple recurring intrusions.

To counter this threat, organizations must adopt a modern NHI security strategy. This includes six essential steps for securing the NHI lifecycle: discovery and inventory to identify and map all existing NHIs; classification to add business context, similar to tagging credentials for traceability; least-privilege enforcement to restrict access to what is strictly necessary; continuous monitoring to detect anomalies and privilege drift; automated rotation and expiration to remove stale credentials; and Non-Human Identity Detection and Response (NHIDR) to proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate risks.

For security leaders, the message is clear. NHIs often hold greater privileges, and therefore greater risk, than human users. Managing them is no longer optional—it is mission-critical to defending the enterprise in the new machine era.

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