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Scrape Timestamp (UTC): 2026-01-20 12:00:13.449
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2026/01/the-hidden-risk-of-orphan-accounts.html
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The Hidden Risk of Orphan Accounts. The Problem: The Identities Left Behind As organizations grow and evolve, employees, contractors, services, and systems come and go - but their accounts often remain. These abandoned or "orphan" accounts sit dormant across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles. The reason they persist isn't negligence - it's fragmentation. Traditional IAM and IGA systems are designed primarily for human users and depend on manual onboarding and integration for each application - connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications never make it that far. Meanwhile, non-human identities (NHIs): service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent-AI processes are natively ungoverned, operating outside standard IAM frameworks and often without ownership, visibility, or lifecycle controls. The result? A shadow layer of untracked identities forming part of the broader identity dark matter - accounts invisible to governance but still active in infrastructure. Why They're Not Tracked The Real-World Risk Orphan accounts are the unlocked back doors of the enterprise. They hold valid credentials, often with elevated privileges, but no active owner. Attackers know this and use them. Orphan accounts fuel multiple risks: The Way Forward: Continuous Identity Audit Enterprises need evidence, not assumptions. Eliminating orphan accounts requires full identity observability - the ability to see and verify every account, permission, and activity, whether managed or not. Modern mitigation includes: When this telemetry feeds into a central identity audit layer, it closes the visibility gap, turning orphan accounts from hidden liabilities into measurable, managed entities. The Orchid Perspective Orchid's Identity Audit capability delivers this foundation. By combining application-level telemetry with automated audit collection, it provides verifiable, continuous insight into how identities - human, non-human, and agent-AI - are actually used. It's not another IAM system; it's the connective tissue that ensures IAM decisions are based on evidence, not estimation. Note: This article was written and contributed by Roy Katmor, CEO of Orchid Security.
Daily Brief Summary
Orphan accounts, often abandoned in evolving organizations, pose significant security risks due to their valid credentials and lack of active ownership.
These accounts, including non-human identities like service accounts and bots, remain untracked and unmanaged, creating potential entry points for cyber attackers.
Traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems struggle to manage these accounts due to their focus on human users and manual integration processes.
The persistence of orphan accounts is attributed to fragmented identity management, leaving a shadow layer of identities outside governance frameworks.
Continuous identity audits are recommended to provide full observability, ensuring all accounts, permissions, and activities are visible and verifiable.
Orchid Security's Identity Audit capability offers a solution by integrating application-level telemetry with automated audit collection for comprehensive identity management.
Implementing such measures transforms orphan accounts from hidden liabilities into manageable entities, enhancing overall enterprise security posture.