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
- Integration Bottlenecks: Every app requires a unique configuration before IAM can manage it. Unmanaged and local systems are rarely prioritized.
- Partial Visibility: IAM tools see only the “managed” slice of identity – leaving behind local admin accounts, service identities, and legacy systems.
- Complex Ownership: Turnover, mergers, and distributed teams make it unclear who owns which application or account.
- AI-Agents and Automation: Agent-AI introduces a new category of semi-autonomous identities that act independently from their human operators, further breaking the IAM model.
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.
- Colonial Pipeline (2021) – attackers entered via an old/inactive VPN account with no MFA. Multiple sources corroborate the “inactive/legacy” account detail.
- Manufacturing company hit by Akira ransomware (2025) – breach came through a “ghost” third-party vendor account that wasn’t deactivated (i.e., an orphaned/vendor account). SOC write-up from Barracuda Managed XDR.
- M&A context – during post-acquisition consolidation, it’s common to discover thousands of stale accounts/tokens; Enterprises note orphaned (often NHI) identities as a persistent post-M&A threat, citing very high rates of still-active former employee tokens.
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.
- Unified Audit Trail: Correlate joiner/mover/leaver events, authentication logs, and usage data to confirm ownership and legitimacy.
- Role Context Mapping: File real usage insights and privilege context into identity profiles – showing who used what, when, and why.
- Continuous Enforcement: Automatically flag or decommission accounts with no activity or ownership, reducing risk without waiting for manual reviews.
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.
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