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Introduction: The Silent Identity Crisis Growing Inside Cloud Environments
Modern organizations have spent years improving their cybersecurity defenses, adding stronger authentication, advanced monitoring, and automated protection systems. However, a new security challenge is emerging from an unexpected place: identities that are not human.
As companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence agents, automation tools, API connections, cloud services, and machine-to-machine communication, they are creating thousands of digital identities that operate silently in the background. These identities often receive permissions, access tokens, and administrative privileges, but many are forgotten after their original purpose disappears.
Security researcher Aleksandr Krasnov has warned that these forgotten digital accounts, known as “ghost credentials,” represent one of the most dangerous blind spots in modern cloud security. These dormant identities may appear inactive, but they can still provide attackers with hidden pathways into critical systems.
The discovery highlights a growing problem: organizations know how to protect employees, but many still struggle to understand who or what their machines trust.
The Ghost Credential Problem: When Forgotten Identities Become Security Backdoors
A Small Cloud Incident Reveals a Much Bigger Threat
A seemingly insignificant security event involving a small cloud account revealed a much larger identity management problem.
The incident began when an AI-powered workflow agent that had remained inactive for nearly a month suddenly became active again. Instead of performing normal tasks, it began making API requests at unusual hours, triggering an internal security investigation.
During the investigation, cybersecurity researcher Aleksandr Krasnov discovered a complex network of forgotten permissions, service accounts, tokens, and automated identities.
These identities were not traditional user accounts. They belonged to software systems, automation platforms, AI agents, and cloud services.
However, despite not having human owners actively managing them, they still maintained access privileges across the environment.
The discovery showed that organizations may have hundreds or even thousands of invisible identities operating outside traditional security controls.
Non-Human Identities: The New Attack Surface of Cloud Security
Machines Now Have Digital Identities Too
For decades, cybersecurity focused primarily on protecting human users.
Security teams monitored employee accounts, passwords, authentication attempts, and suspicious login behavior.
However, modern cloud environments have changed the equation.
Today, applications authenticate with other applications. AI agents communicate with APIs. DevOps pipelines deploy software automatically. Cloud platforms exchange credentials continuously.
Each of these interactions creates a non-human identity.
Examples include:
Service accounts
API keys
Cloud access tokens
AI agents
Automation bots
CI/CD pipeline identities
Database connectors
Application credentials
The problem is that many of these identities remain active long after their original purpose has ended.
The Dangerous Trust Paths Attackers Can Exploit
A Forgotten Token Can Become a Highway Into Production Systems
Krasnov’s research highlights how attackers no longer need to break through the strongest security defenses.
Instead, they can search for weak points created by forgotten trust relationships.
An exposed API key might seem harmless because it belongs to an old automation account.
However, that account may have permissions connected to another service.
That second service may have access to a cloud administrator role.
The attacker can then move through a chain of permissions until reaching highly privileged systems.
This creates a dangerous security situation where a low-level identity can eventually become a gateway to complete infrastructure compromise.
Attackers Prefer Ghost Credentials Over Traditional Attacks
Why Hackers May Choose Five Minutes Instead of Two Weeks
Traditional cyberattacks often require significant effort.
Attackers may spend weeks creating phishing campaigns, researching targets, and avoiding detection.
However, exposed credentials offer a much easier path.
Krasnov explains that attackers may choose to spend only minutes searching for existing tokens instead of building complicated attacks.
A leaked credential can immediately provide:
Cloud access
Internal application permissions
Database connections
Identity provider access
Administrative privileges
The advantage for attackers is simple: organizations often forget what they have created.
Deep Analysis: Hunting Ghost Credentials and Hidden Trust Relationships
Understanding Identity Discovery From a
Security teams need visibility into every identity operating inside their infrastructure.
Traditional identity management tools often focus only on employees.
However, modern environments require a complete identity map containing both humans and machines.
A basic investigation may begin by reviewing cloud identities.
Example AWS identity review:
aws iam list-users aws iam list-roles aws iam list-access-keys
Checking suspicious access activity:
aws cloudtrail lookup-events \n--lookup-attributes AttributeKey=EventName,AttributeValue=ConsoleLogin
Finding inactive credentials:
aws iam get-credential-report
Searching for Suspicious API Tokens
Developers and automation systems frequently store secrets in configuration files.
Security teams can scan environments using secret detection tools.
Example:
grep -R "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" /project/
or:
grep -R "API_KEY" /var/www/
More advanced security platforms analyze:
Credential age
Last usage
Permission scope
Connected services
Trust relationships
Mapping Identity Relationships
The biggest challenge is not finding identities.
The challenge is understanding what they can access.
A security graph should answer questions like:
Which service accounts can access production?
Which AI agents have administrator permissions?
Which inactive tokens still work?
Which identities can escalate privileges?
Which accounts connect directly to identity providers?
This is the problem NHI Hound attempts to solve.
NHI Hound: Building a Map of Invisible Digital Identities
An Open Source Tool Designed to Expose Hidden Trust
Krasnov plans to release NHI Hound, an open-source security tool designed to discover and analyze non-human identities.
The tool collects identity information from platforms including:
Okta
GitHub
Cloud IAM systems
Enterprise identity platforms
Instead of simply listing accounts, NHI Hound attempts to understand relationships between identities.
It creates a trust graph showing how one identity may influence another.
Turning Identity Chaos Into Security Intelligence
Finding Dangerous Permission Chains
One of the most valuable features of NHI Hound is identifying dangerous privilege relationships.
For example:
A forgotten automation account may appear low-risk.
However:
Automation account → Deployment service → Cloud administrator role → Identity provider access
The final result could be complete enterprise compromise.
NHI Hound attempts to expose these hidden connections before attackers discover them.
The Enterprise Challenge: Too Many Identities, Too Much Noise
Why Large Companies Face a Bigger Problem
Small and medium organizations may be able to clean up their identity landscape within months.
However, large enterprises face a completely different challenge.
As organizations grow, their identity networks become extremely complicated.
A single developer may create hundreds of machine identities throughout their career.
These include:
Testing accounts
Temporary cloud credentials
Development keys
Automation tokens
Deployment identities
When thousands of employees create similar identities, the security graph becomes difficult to understand.
The Future of Identity Security Requires a New Approach
Human Accounts Are No Longer Enough
Traditional identity security was built around a simple assumption:
Every account belongs to a person.
That assumption is no longer accurate.
The future of cybersecurity requires organizations to manage identities belonging to:
Humans
Applications
Artificial intelligence agents
Automated workflows
Cloud services
Every identity needs ownership, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
Black Hat USA 2026: Spotlight on Emerging Identity Threats
Cybersecurity Experts Focus on New Attack Strategies
The topic of ghost credentials and non-human identity risks is expected to receive attention at Black Hat USA 2026.
The event brings together security researchers, defenders, and industry experts to discuss emerging threats, offensive techniques, and defensive technologies.
Identity security has become one of the most important topics because attackers increasingly target trust relationships rather than traditional vulnerabilities.
What Undercode Say:
The Identity Battlefield Has Changed Forever
The biggest cybersecurity mistake organizations can make today is assuming that only humans create risk.
Machines now have identities.
AI agents now make decisions.
Applications now communicate independently.
Cloud systems now create thousands of trust relationships automatically.
The ghost credential problem represents a fundamental shift in cybersecurity.
Attackers no longer need to defeat every security layer.
They only need to find one forgotten identity.
A single abandoned token can become the beginning of a major breach.
The rise of AI makes this problem even more urgent.
AI agents are designed to act independently.
They can access systems, call APIs, analyze information, and execute workflows.
Without proper controls, an AI agent with excessive permissions becomes a powerful attack target.
Organizations must stop thinking about identity as a human-only concept.
Every digital actor needs an identity strategy.
Every credential needs ownership.
Every permission needs justification.
Every automated system needs monitoring.
The security industry spent years developing Zero Trust principles for employees.
Now the same philosophy must expand toward machines.
No service account should automatically be trusted.
No API key should exist forever.
No automation identity should remain invisible.
The future security model should answer three simple questions:
Who is this identity?
What can it access?
Why does it still need that access?
Companies that cannot answer these questions will struggle to defend modern cloud environments.
Identity visibility will become as important as vulnerability scanning.
The next generation of security platforms will likely focus less on passwords and more on relationship intelligence.
Understanding trust paths will become a critical defensive capability.
Ghost credentials are not just forgotten accounts.
They are forgotten decisions about trust.
And in cybersecurity, forgotten trust is often where attackers find opportunity.
Prediction
(+1) AI-Driven Identity Security Will Become a Major Enterprise Priority 🚀
Organizations will increasingly invest in tools that discover, monitor, and control non-human identities.
As AI agents and automation become more common, identity graph technology will likely become a standard part of cloud security programs.
Companies that adopt proactive identity management will reduce the risk of hidden privilege escalation attacks.
(-1) Large Enterprises May Struggle With Identity Cleanup Challenges ⚠️
Organizations with decades of accumulated cloud accounts, APIs, and automation systems may face enormous challenges.
Without strong governance, identity graphs may become too complex to manage effectively.
Security teams may discover thousands of risky relationships that require years of cleanup.
✅ The growth of non-human identities is a real cybersecurity challenge as organizations increasingly rely on automation, APIs, and cloud services.
✅ Forgotten credentials and excessive permissions are recognized security risks because attackers can abuse existing access instead of exploiting traditional vulnerabilities.
❌ The existence of every individual ghost credential incident described cannot be independently verified without additional technical disclosure from the affected organization.
Overall, the broader security issue is credible: unmanaged machine identities represent a growing attack surface in modern enterprises.
▶️ Related Video (76% Match):
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