Every CISO knows the drill after a breach. Pull the incident report and find out who owned the compromised account. For a human identity, this involves checking the directory and finding the manager. For machine identities, the trail runs cold because they are rarely assigned an owner when created. This “ownership vacuum” occurs when a machine identity holds real access without human oversight—leaving no one accountable for what it can reach or what happens when something goes wrong.
KPMG’s 2026 Cybersecurity and Technology Risk Survey found that machine identities often skip the provisioning process built for humans, with the number of such cases rising as generative AI-use spreads across the organisation. For highly regulated industries like BFSI, IT Services and Healthcare, this is a huge challenge because they are the ones currently moving the fastest on agentic AI, running copilots inside core banking systems, healthcare processes and wiring agents into delivery pipelines. They are also piling up on non-human identities as a consequence of AI adoption getting the greenlight without ownership being assigned.
Without ownership of machine identities, credentials are never rotated, their scope remains unchecked and orphaned API keys, service accounts and agent tokens linger long after projects are decommissioned. For an adversary, this is the ultimate blind spot and low hanging fruit to exploit. It only takes one compromised non-human identity with elevated privileges for adversaries to map lateral attack paths and compromise complex CI/CD pipelines, autonomous agent workflows and core production stores. It helps them move undetected. Clear ownership is essential to anchor machine identities to real-time privilege auditing, incident response and timely revocation before unmanaged access turns into a major breach.
Addressing the question of ownership
Tenable’s Cloud and AI Security Risk Report 2026 shows that over 50% of non-human identities carry excessive permissions, a higher rate than human accounts get. More than a third of those overprivileged identities sit inactive. What’s missing here is someone whose job it is to look at that list and decide who stays, what goes and who answers for it. Endpoint detection tools will only tell you that an identity exists but won’t tell you whose problem it is.
Three things fix the ‘ownership vacuum’. First, assign a human owner the moment an identity is created instead of waiting for the next audit cycle. At the time of creation, tie every service account, API key, and agent to a named person and a reason it exists. When teams take ownership of non-human identities, fixing the problem becomes easier.
Second, bring in platforms built specifically to secure non-human identities like exposure management. Employees log in and log out but machine identities call APIs continuously and rarely get a second look once they are running.
Continuous threat exposure management platforms are built to catch the pattern of overprivileged and dormant accounts, which permissions were used versus the level of permissions granted, and which access paths changed since the last review, and which identities lead to the most business-critical assets. If an account goes quiet or a permission set grows past what the job needs, that shows up the next time it is used along with the owner attached to it. This ensures owners of non-human identities give and stop permissions the right way.
Third, stop treating unowned accounts as an audit footnote. When security is viewed as a compliance checkbox, identities are checked once a year. Given how fast an agent is deployed in organisations today, this cadence adds more risk. Unowned identities need the same continuous attention given to critical vulnerabilities because most adversaries target compromised credentials as the initial attack vector.
Adoption may be slow because it forces teams to change how they work but this change is necessary to combat the new wave of cyber threats. A CISO who waits for the next audit cycle to ask who owns what identity will keep finding blank spaces in every incident report. Those who start assigning ownership to identities and implement exposure management to manage them will reduce risk dramatically and prevent attacks from happening in the first place.
Authored by Ben Mudie, Field CTO APJ, Tenable
