Tackling the OWASP top 10 NHI risks for 2025

Non-human identities like service accounts, API keys, and machine tokens are increasingly used in systems, outnumbering human ones. The OWASP top 10 list of 2025 highlights critical security risks tied to these non-human identities, including access left open, secrets reused, credentials exposed, old tokens lingering quietly, leaked secrets opening the door to full system compromise, third-party tools becoming a foothold for attackers, outdated authentication methods exposing systems, overprivileged service accounts causing greater blast radius when compromised, CI/CD pipelines relying on service accounts being high-value targets, long-lived secrets living far longer than they should, reusing non-human identities across environments multiplying the blast radius, and non-human identities being used for automation rather than manual work. To confront these risks, teams should adopt a robust approach including inventory assessments, threat detection and response planning, zero trust principles, compliance enforcement, security training for staff, clearly defined lifecycle policies, regular strategy reviews, monitoring and auditing activity, and frequent threat assessments to confirm that non-human identities remain safe.

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