Machine Credentials Are Identities, It's Time to Treat Them That Way

What Are Non-Human Identities (NHIs)?

Non-human identities (NHIs) are the bots, service accounts, and machine-to-machine actors that keep the cloud running. Examples include:

• Automated scripts querying databases
  
  
• AI chatbots serving customers
  
  
• Smart devices like IoT thermostats
  
  
• Service accounts connecting SaaS applications

In modern enterprises, NHIs outnumber humans by as much as 50 to 1. That imbalance makes them a prime target for attackers.

Why NHI Credentials Create Silent Risks

Human identities are improving in security with phishing-resistant authentication methods like device-bound passkeys. NHIs, however, still rely on weak practices:

• Long-lived secrets such as API keys and client credentials
  
  
• Exportable tokens like bearer tokens
  
  
• Secret sprawl across CI/CD pipelines and cloud tenants
  
  

Unlike humans, NHIs lack behavioral baselines. A compromised service account can continue issuing thousands of routine API calls per hour, making malicious activity nearly impossible to detect.

Additionally, many of them authenticate with long-lived secrets like API keys and client credentials, and authorize access to sensitive data with exportable credentials like bearer tokens. This leads to secret sprawl across many organizations.

Breaches Caused by Weak NHI Credentials

One of the sharpest asymmetries in identity security shows up in how we monitor for trouble: with human logins, we're tuned to flag the oddities — sudden logins from a new IP in Bucharest at 3 a.m., or a spike in file downloads that doesn't match the user's usual rhythm — because behavioral baselines give us a fighting chance to catch the impersonators early, triggering alerts or lockouts before the damage occurs. 

The risks are not theoretical. High-profile attacks have exploited NHIs to devastating effect:

• SolarWinds (2020): Threat actors compromised the Orion build process and delivered malicious updates to thousands of customers. Attackers also abused service accounts to move laterally across networks and access sensitive resources, remaining undetected for months (Coalition, Silverfort).
  
  
• MOVEit (2023): Attackers exploited a zero-day in the MOVEit managed file transfer service, using automated file processes to exfiltrate data from thousands of organizations. Tens of millions of records were exposed without triggering alerts (NCSC).
  
  

The gap here is structural: without context-aware signals like device posture or ephemeral token validation, NHI takeovers don't just evade detection; they amplify the blast radius. 

Regulatory and Financial Fallout

Regulators do not distinguish between human and machine identity breaches. GDPR, SEC, and other frameworks impose penalties exceeding $100 million for major incidents. For example, Meta was fined €251 million (~US$263 million) by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for GDPR violations tied to user data exposure.

The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 shows the global average cost of a breach is $4.44 million, while U.S. breaches average $10.22 million, driven higher by regulatory scrutiny and extended response times. 

When NHIs are involved, costs multiply. Attacks can halt manufacturing lines via insecure IoT devices or stall cloud deployments through hijacked service accounts. The result: NHI compromises often cost 2–3x more than human-related breaches.

In practice, this means credential security can't afford siloed thinking: threats treat humans and NHIs as interchangeable stepping stones, so the only sustainable approach is consistent standards that close gaps across the entire identity landscape.

How Strong Credentials Mitigate NHI Risk

Adopting strong credentials for NHIs delivers concrete advantages by enforcing zero-trust principles through consistent policies that verify device posture, network location, and operating system integrity in real time: 

• Use device-bound, hardware-backed authentication instead of static secrets
  
  
• Enforce posture checks on operating systems, network location, and device integrity
  
  
• Deploy ephemeral, automatically expiring credentials that revoke on anomaly detection

Looking ahead, as AI-driven automation and edge computing expand, security investments will compound across humans and machines. The result is a unified defense that doesn't just patch holes but rearchitects trust, turning NHIs from potential liabilities into reliable extensions of your security fabric. 

Unifying Human and NHI Security with Beyond Identity

By aligning authentication standards for bots, services, and humans alike, organizations don't just reduce their attack surface; they build a cohesive security posture that adapts to the relentless expansion of AI and edge technologies, turning potential weak points into fortified assets that drive efficiency rather than erode it.

Want to learn more? Join our webinar: “How to Protect Agents, Automated Scripts, and Service” to learn how Beyond Identity can help make account takeovers through NHI’s impossible.