In the first half of 2025, the cybersecurity landscape has seen a significant and accelerating rise in unmanaged machine identities—digital credentials used by non-human users such as applications, bots, and automated processes. According to recent research, the growth of these non-human identities (NHIs) is now outpacing the creation of human user accounts, dramatically shifting the balance of identity management within organizations.
Machine Identities: Quietly Multiplying
Technological advancements and the increasing adoption of automation—ranging from DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and microservices, to widespread integration of AI and Internet of Things (IoT) devices—have driven an explosive proliferation of machine identities. Unlike human credentials, these often consist of:
- API keys
- Service accounts
- Tokens
- Digital certificates
While necessary for seamless machine-to-machine interactions and efficient automation, many of these credentials remain unmanaged or poorly governed. This means organizations may have little or no oversight into how these identities are created, used, or deprovisioned.
Escalating Risks: A Target for Attackers
The growth in machine identities directly correlates with increased security risk. Unmanaged credentials are frequently:
- Hardcoded or left unrotated for long periods
- Granted excessive or persistent permissions
- Left orphaned when services are decommissioned
These factors make machine identities a prime target for cyberattacks, as threat actors seek to exploit exposed or forgotten credentials to gain unauthorized network access or facilitate lateral movement within environments.
Expert Concerns: A Major Security Blind Spot
Cybersecurity experts are sounding the alarm. The rapid adoption of cloud platforms, SaaS solutions, and automation tooling has created a sprawling ecosystem where tracking and securing every machine identity is daunting. Unlike human users, machine accounts can easily be overlooked by traditional identity and access management (IAM) controls, which are often ill-equipped to audit, manage, and rotate non-human credentials.
The result: non-human identities now represent one of the largest and fastest-growing attack surfaces in many organizations, far outnumbering human users and frequently bypassing basic security hygiene.
Recommended Security Practices
To counteract these emerging risks, organizations are urged to prioritize the management of machine identities with the same rigor as human credentials:
- Establish a comprehensive inventory of all machine identities, spanning cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
- Automate credential management, including routine rotation, privilege review, and timely deprovisioning.
- Enforce least-privilege and zero-trust principles for all machine accounts, restricting their access strictly to what is necessary.
- Integrate machine identity governance into broader IAM and security frameworks, recognizing these credentials as critical assets.
