A Guide to Managing Machine and Service Accounts with PAM

Beyond Humans: Managing Machine and Service Accounts with Privileged access management

In most organizations today, machine and service accounts have quietly outgrown human users. These non-human identities, ranging from automation scripts and APIs to AI agents, often operate behind the scenes with powerful access. Yet, they tend to slip through the cracks of traditional security oversight. As a result, they pose a growing threat that many businesses are only beginning to recognize.

The Rise of Non-Human Identities

Machine identities like APIs, bots, service accounts, containers, and scripts are foundational to modern IT infrastructure. These digital entities perform behind-the-scenes tasks such as data synchronization, automated patching, and cross-platform communication. Their growth has been fueled by trends like DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native development, where speed and automation are key. A payment processing script that connects with banking APIs or a Kubernetes workload that spins up containerized apps both operate under machine identities that often hold privileged access. Yet, they rarely receive the same governance as human authorized users. As digital ecosystems become more interconnected, these non-human identities are multiplying, making it critical to manage their lifecycle, credentials, and privileged user access with the same rigor as human identities.

The Risks of Ignoring Machine Accounts

Machine accounts like service accounts, CI/CD bots, and application identities, are essential for automation, but ignoring their security is a critical oversight. These non-human identities often contain hardcoded credentials embedded in scripts or repositories, making them low-hanging fruit for attackers. A striking example is the Codecov breach, where attackers exploited a vulnerability in the CI/CD pipeline to harvest credentials and infiltrate hundreds of customer environments.

Excessive privileges to service accounts are another major threat. To avoid operational hiccups, organizations often grant them domain-wide access, far beyond what's needed. This unrestricted access, once compromised, enables lateral movement across systems without triggering alarms.

Worse, service accounts usually lack centralized oversight. Their passwords are rarely rotated due to the fear of breaking critical processes, leaving them vulnerable for months or even years. For example, in the Cloudflare incident, thousands of service accounts were rotated after a breach, but four remained unrotated an oversight that could have led to persistent compromise.

How PAM Can Secure Machine Identities

Machine identities such as APIs, service accounts, and automated scripts, are becoming as common as human users in modern IT environments. Privileged Access Management (PAM) plays a crucial role in securing them by minimizing standing privileges and enforcing tight control over credential usage.

A key capability is credential vaulting with automated rotation, which ensures that machine credentials like API keys or SSH secrets are stored securely and regularly updated, reducing the risk of theft or misuse. Privileged Access Management also supports Just-in-Time (JIT) access for APIs, granting temporary, purpose-specific permissions only when needed, effectively narrowing the attack window.

Many PAM solutions integrate with enterprise tools like Microsoft Entra ID, CyberArk, or BeyondTrust to provide centralized policy enforcement and automated provisioning. This enables automated discovery of machine accounts, helping security teams map and manage all identities with precision.

By embedding these capabilities, organizations can reduce their identity attack surface and enforce least-privilege access, making PAM a foundational control for securing machine-to-machine interactions in zero trust architectures.

Best Practices for Implementation

Start with a comprehensive inventory of all privileged and non-human accounts, including service, root, and cloud-based accounts. Identify the owner, access rights, and usage context for each. Review and update this inventory regularly to eliminate orphaned or overprovisioned accounts.

Enforce least privilege and separation of duties by granting only the minimum access required for each role. Use role-based access control and implement privilege elevation through formal approval processes, time-bound access, and just-in-time provisioning.

Establish strong credential lifecycle management using vaulting, automated password rotation, and multifactor authentication. Avoid shared accounts and hardcoded credentials.

Log and monitor all privileged activity across critical systems. Use real-time alerts and risk analysis to detect misuse. Prioritize securing high-risk accounts.

Finally, train IT and DevOps teams continuously, and document PAM policies clearly to ensure accountability, compliance, and a culture of security awareness.

Conclusion

Non-human accounts have become prime targets for attackers. If your Privileged Access Management (PAM) program doesn’t account for them, your organization is operating with a critical blind spot. TechDemocracy delivers purpose-built, cost-effective PAM solutions tailored to your environment, contact us now!