September 17, 2024 By Tim Eades, CEO, Anetac
Service accounts are non-human identities used to automate machine-to-machine interactions. They support critical functions – such as running scripts, services, and applications like websites, APIs, and databases – and facilitate integrations, operating as a proxy to humans and supporting business processes.
In an ideal world, service accounts have one singular “job”, are granted least privileged access to resources, and are monitored and managed with identity security hygiene best practices in mind. In this utopia, threat actors and data breaches are non-existent.
But this is the real world. Service accounts are often overprivileged, forgotten about and lack proper password security protocols. Some of these once-productive service accounts become dormant over time, making them suitable targets for threat actors.