The problem: residual identity
As organizations grow and evolve, employees, contractors, services, and systems come and go, but often those accounts remain. These abandoned or “orphaned” accounts lie dormant across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles.
They persist not because of neglect but because of fragmentation.
Traditional IAM and IGA systems are primarily designed for human users and rely on manual onboarding and integration of each application, such as connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications don’t get that far. On the other hand, non-human identities (NHIs)—service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent AI processes—are not natively managed, operate outside of standard IAM frameworks, and often have no ownership, visibility, or lifecycle control.
result? A shadowy layer of untracked identity that forms part of the dark matter of a broader identity. Accounts that are invisible to governance but are still active within the infrastructure.
Why am I not being tracked?
Integration bottleneck: Every app requires unique configuration to be managed by IAM. Unmanaged local systems are rarely preferred. Partial visibility: IAM tools only show a “managed” slice of identity, leaving local administrator accounts, service identities, and legacy systems behind. Complex ownership: Turnover, mergers, and distributed teams make it unclear who owns which applications and accounts. AI agents and automation: Agent-AI introduces a new category of semi-autonomous identities that operate independently of human operators, further breaking away from the IAM model.
Learn more about IAM shortcuts and their implications.
real world risks
Orphaned accounts are an unlocked corporate backdoor.
They have valid credentials and often elevated privileges, but no active owner. Attackers know this and take advantage of it.
Colonial Pipeline (2021) – Attackers gained entry via old/inactive VPN accounts without MFA. Multiple sources corroborate details of “inactive/legacy” accounts. Manufacturer, Akira Ransomware Victim (2025) – The breach occurred via a “ghost” third-party vendor account that was not deactivated (i.e., orphaned/vendor account). SOC writes from Barracuda Managed XDR. M&A situations – During post-acquisition integration, it is common for thousands of stale accounts/tokens to be discovered. Companies point to orphaned (often NHI) identities as a persistent threat post-M&A due to the very high proportion of ex-employee tokens that remain active.
Orphaned accounts pose multiple risks.
Compliance Risk: Violates least privilege and deprovisioning requirements (ISO 27001, NIS2, PCI DSS, FedRAMP). Operational inefficiencies: increased license count and unnecessary audit overhead. Incident response delays: Invisible accounts slow down forensics and remediation.
Future direction: Continuous identity auditing
Companies need evidence, not assumptions. Eliminating orphaned accounts requires complete identity observability, the ability to view and verify all accounts, permissions, and activity, managed or unmanaged.
The latest mitigations include:
Identity Telemetry Collection: Extract activity signals directly from managed and unmanaged applications. Unified audit trail: Correlate join/move/leave events, authentication logs, and usage data to confirm ownership and legitimacy. Role context mapping: File actual usage insights and privilege context into identity profiles to show who used it, when, and why. Continuous enforcement: Automatically flag or retire activity and unowned accounts to reduce risk without waiting for manual review.
When this telemetry feeds into a central identity audit layer, it closes visibility gaps and transforms orphaned accounts from hidden liabilities to measurable, managed entities.
For more information, see Audit Playbook: Continuous Application Inventory Report.
orchid’s perspective
Orchid’s identity auditing capabilities provide this foundation. Application-level telemetry combined with automated audit collection provides continuous, verifiable insight into how human, non-human, and agent AI identities are actually used.
This is not another IAM system. It is the connective tissue that ensures that IAM decisions are based on evidence rather than presumption.
Note: This article was written and contributed by Roy Katmor, CEO of Orchid Security.
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