2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (The Hacker News)
When we talk about identity in cybersecurity, most people think of usernames, passwords, and the occasional MFA prompt. But lurking beneath the surface is a growing threat that does not involve human credentials at all, as we witness the exponential growth of Non-Human Identities (NHIs). At the top of mind when NHIs are mentioned, most security teams immediately think of Service Accounts .
But NHIs go far beyond that. You've got Service Principals , Snowflake Roles , IAM Roles , and platform-specific constructs from AWS, Azure, GCP, and more. The truth is, NHIs can vary just as widely as the services and environments in your modern tech stack, and managing them means understanding this diversity.
The real danger lies in how these identities authenticate. Non-Human Identities, for the most part, authenticate using secrets : API keys, tokens, certificates, and other credentials that grant access to systems, data, and critical infrastructure. These secrets are what attackers want most.
And shockingly, most companies have no idea how many secrets they have, where they're stored, or who is using them. The State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 revealed two jaw-dropping stats: Why is this happening? A part of the story is that there's no MFA for machines . No verification prompt.
When a developer creates a token, they often grant it wider access than needed, just to make sure things work. Expiration dates? Optional. Some secrets are created with 50-year validity windows.
Why? Because teams don't want the app to break next year. They choose speed over security. This creates a massive blast radius.
If one of those secrets leaks, it can unlock everything from production databases to cloud resources, without triggering any alerts. Detecting compromised NHIs is much harder than with humans. A login from Tokyo at 2 am might raise red flags for a person, but machines talk to each other 24/7 from all over the world.
Malicious activity blends right in . Many of these secrets act like invisible backdoors, enabling lateral movement, supply chain attacks, and undetected breaches. The Toyota incident is a perfect example — one leaked secret can take down a global system.
This is why attackers love NHIs and their secrets . The permissions are too often high, the visibility is commonly low, and the consequences can be huge. The shift to cloud-native, microservices-heavy environments has introduced thousands of NHIs per organization.
NHIs now outnumber human identities from 50:1 to a 100:1 ratio, and this is only expected to increase. These digital workers connect services, automate tasks, and drive AI pipelines — and every single one of them needs secrets to function. But unlike human credentials: They often lack expiration , ownership , and auditability .
The result? Secrets sprawl. Overprivileged access. And one tiny leak away from a massive breach.
Legacy identity governance and PAM tools were built for human users, an era when everything was centrally managed. These tools still do a fine job enforcing password complexity, managing break-glass accounts, and governing access to internal apps. But NHIs break this model completely.
Here's why: Security teams are left chasing shadows, manually trying to piece together where a secret came from, what it accesses, and whether it's even still in use. This reactive approach doesn't scale, and it leaves your organization dangerously exposed. This is where GitGuardian NHI Governance comes into play.
GitGuardian has taken its deep expertise in secrets detection and remediation and turned it into something much more powerful: a complete governance layer for machine identities and their credentials. Here's what makes it stand out: Think of it as an end-to-end visual graph of your entire secrets landscape. The map connects the dots between: NHI Governance goes beyond visibility.
It enables true lifecycle management of secrets — tracking their creation, usage, rotation, and revocation. Security teams can: The platform also includes a policy engine that helps teams enforce consistent controls across all vaults and benchmark themselves against standards like OWASP Top 10 . You can track: A big driver of this risk is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) , where AI answers questions using your internal data.
It's useful, but if secrets are hiding in that data, they can be surfaced by mistake. AI agents are being plugged into everything — Slack, Jira, Confluence, internal docs — to unlock productivity. But with each new connection, the risk of secret sprawl grows.
Secrets aren't just leaking from code anymore. They show up in docs, tickets, messages, and when AI agents access those systems, they can accidentally expose credentials in responses or logs. One of the most forward-looking aspects of the GitGuardian platform is that it can help fix AI-driven secret sprawl: AI is moving fast.
But secrets are leaking faster. With NHI Governance, GitGuardian is offering a blueprint for organizations to bring order to chaos and control to an identity layer that's long been left in the dark. Whether you're trying to: The GitGuardian platform might just be your new best friend.
Because in a world where identities are the perimeter, ignoring non-human identities is no longer an option . Want to see NHI Governance in action? Request a Demo or check out the full product overview at GitGuardian..
