As organizations grow, abandoned accounts from departed employees, vendors, and systems remain active, creating a shadow layer of untracked identities that attackers exploit. This article explores why traditional IAM systems fail to capture these 'orphan' accounts, the real-world incidents they've fueled, and the continuous audit approach required to eliminate this hidden risk.
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 Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) systems are designed primarily for human users and depend on manual onboarding and integration for each application. This requires connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications never make it that far through the integration pipeline.
Meanwhile, non-human identities (NHIs) - service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent-AI processes - are natively ungoverned. They operate outside standard IAM frameworks and often lack ownership, visibility, or lifecycle controls. The result is 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
Integration Bottlenecks: Every application requires a unique configuration before IAM can manage it. Unmanaged and local systems are rarely prioritized for integration, leaving them outside the governance perimeter.
Partial Visibility: IAM tools see only the "managed" slice of identity. Local admin accounts, service identities, and legacy systems remain invisible to standard governance dashboards.
Complex Ownership: Turnover, mergers, and distributed teams make it unclear who owns which application or account. When a department disbands or a vendor relationship ends, the accountability chain breaks.
AI-Agents and Automation: Agent-AI introduces a new category of semi-autonomous identities that act independently from their human operators, further breaking the traditional IAM model that assumes human-driven access patterns.
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 actively hunt for them.
Colonial Pipeline (2021): Attackers entered via an old/inactive VPN account with no MFA. Multiple sources corroborate the "inactive/legacy" account detail as the initial access vector.
Manufacturing Company (2025): A breach came through a "ghost" third-party vendor account that wasn't deactivated - a classic orphaned/vendor account scenario. The SOC write-up from Barracuda Managed XDR highlighted how this stale account provided lateral movement access.
M&A Context: During post-acquisition consolidation, it's common to discover thousands of stale accounts and tokens. Enterprises consistently note orphaned (often NHI) identities as a persistent post-M&A threat, citing very high rates of still-active former employee tokens and service accounts from acquired systems.
Orphan accounts fuel multiple risks:
- Compliance exposure: Violates least-privilege and deprovisioning requirements (ISO 27001, NIS2, PCI DSS, FedRAMP)
- Operational inefficiency: Inflated license counts and unnecessary audit overhead
- Incident response drag: Forensics and remediation slow down when unseen accounts are involved
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:
Identity Telemetry Collection: Extract activity signals directly from applications, managed and unmanaged. This goes beyond traditional IAM logs to capture actual usage patterns from source systems.
Unified Audit Trail: Correlate joiner/mover/leaver events, authentication logs, and usage data to confirm ownership and legitimacy. This creates a timeline that shows when an account was created, who owned it, and when activity stopped.
Role Context Mapping: File real usage insights and privilege context into identity profiles - showing who used what, when, and why. This moves beyond static role definitions to dynamic understanding of actual access patterns.
Continuous Enforcement: Automatically flag or decommission accounts with no activity or ownership, reducing risk without waiting for manual reviews. This shifts from periodic audits to real-time governance.
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 key is moving from assumption-based governance to evidence-based governance.
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. The approach recognizes that traditional IAM systems, while essential, are incomplete. They manage what they can see, but they don't see everything.
The solution lies in extending governance beyond the managed perimeter. This means:
- Application-level discovery: Identifying all systems and platforms where identities exist, regardless of whether they're in the IAM system
- Activity correlation: Matching authentication events with actual usage patterns to distinguish active from inactive accounts
- Ownership attribution: Using organizational data, project assignments, and activity patterns to establish or re-establish accountability
- Automated remediation: Creating workflows that safely decommission or re-assign orphan accounts based on policy
This continuous audit approach transforms identity governance from a periodic cleanup exercise into an ongoing operational capability. It acknowledges that in modern, distributed environments, identity sprawl is inevitable - but unmanaged identity sprawl is unacceptable.
The business case extends beyond security. Proper identity governance reduces license costs, simplifies compliance reporting, and accelerates incident response. When every account has a clear owner and purpose, security teams can focus on genuine threats rather than chasing ghost accounts.
For organizations looking to implement this approach, the starting point is inventory. You can't govern what you can't see. Modern identity audit tools provide the visibility, but the organizational commitment to continuous governance determines success. This means integrating identity audit into regular security operations, not treating it as a one-time project.
The hidden risk of orphan accounts won't disappear with better tools alone. It requires a shift in mindset - from viewing identity management as a human resources function to recognizing it as critical infrastructure security. Every account, whether human or non-human, is a potential access point. And every unmanaged account is a liability waiting to be exploited.
This article was written and contributed by Roy Katmor, CEO of Orchid Security.
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