5 Ways Non-Human Identity Ownership Impacts Your Security Program

As we meet with customers to discuss non-human identity security strategy, the topic of ownership comes up more frequently as one of the key component for any comprehensive Non-Human Identity Managament (NHIM) program. Our discoveries, along with the insights from our Context Reconstruction Engine have underscored the importance of clearly defined ownership in effectively managing these identities. Understanding who is responsible for non-human identities (NHIs) is essential for maintaining security, ensuring compliance, and mitigating risks, making it a foundational element of any successful identity governance strategy.

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What is NHI Ownership?

NHI ownership refers to the clear designation of responsibility for managing non-human identities within an organization. This includes accountability for the creation, maintenance, and oversight of NHIs to ensure they are appropriately configured, monitored, and reviewed. Effective NHI ownership is essential for enforcing governance policies, maintaining compliance, and mitigating security risks associated with unauthorized access or misuse of NHIs. Without defined ownership, organizations may face challenges in conducting regular reviews, addressing vulnerabilities, and ensuring that NHIs adhere to the principle of least privilege.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the importance of assigning ownership to every NHI by applying the NIST CSF 2.0 framework. 

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Let’s dive into five specific ways NHI ownership directly impacts your organization’s security posture: 

1. Unmanaged Insider Threats: Managing insider threats is an important part of aligning with the Identify principle. Insider threats are particularly dangerous because unowned or orphaned accounts offer easy opportunities for exploitation. Without assigned ownership, detecting suspicious activity becomes more difficult, and accountability diminishes.
   This lack of oversight can lead to privilege creep, where NHIs accumulate access rights over time. In the absence of clear ownership, insiders can escalate privileges, compromising sensitive data and bypassing security controls.

2. Ineffective Identity and Access Management (IAM): The Protect principle focuses on understanding risks, including improper access control. Effective IAM requires knowing - who -or what- has access to which systems. In environments with poor NHI ownership, organizational changes can result in users retaining unnecessary privileges, creating significant security risks.
   Without clear accountability, managing access during transitions becomes complicated. Orphaned accounts—those without clear ownership—pose a serious threat, as malicious actors can exploit them to infiltrate systems undetected.

3. Increased Alert Fatigue: Without clear NHI ownership, security teams can easily get overwhelmed by alerts that lack sufficient context. The NIST CSF principle Detect emphasizes the importance of identifying potential cybersecurity events, but undefined NHI ownership, separating real threats from false positives become a challenge. 
   When ownership is unclear, if unusual activities occur, it’s difficult to determine which accounts require immediate attention, leading to a barrage of false positives. This alert overload can lead to alert fatigue, where critical warnings are missed. The absence of defined ownership also complicates shadow IT management, leaving your organization more vulnerable to breaches.

4. Increased Administrative Overhead: Manually managing non-human identities imposes a heavy administrative burden on security teams, conflicting with the Respond principle, which emphasizes efficient incident handling. Without clear ownership, security teams must manually review accounts to identify the appropriate person to remediate risks, such as through rotation or decommissioning of NHIs.
   This lack of ownership undermines the confidence of security teams during the remediation process, as they worry that actions taken could disrupt business continuity. Additionally, the manual effort required to establish the business justification for NHIs is tedious, often involving extensive communication across different silos to assess the impact of the remediation process.

5. Challenges in Conducting Regular Reviews/Attestation: Regular access reviews are essential for effective governance of non-human identities. However, when ownership is unclear, conducting these reviews becomes challenging. Security teams may find it difficult to identify which NHIs require assessment and who is responsible for overseeing the review process. This ambiguity can lead to inconsistent governance practices, creating gaps in oversight and increasing the risk of unmanaged identities failing to follow the Govern principle.

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Gaps in NHI ownership can significantly weaken your cybersecurity strategy. Issues like alert fatigue, ineffective IAM, unmanaged insider threats, and administrative burdens expose your organization to unnecessary risks.

Organizations can strengthen their security posture by recognizing these vulnerabilities and addressing weak governance, poor vulnerability management, and generic training. Prioritizing clear NHI ownership is essential to staying ahead of evolving threats and safeguarding your most valuable assets.

Learn more about the NIST CSF 2.0 framework applied to non human identity security and lifecycle here.

Own It. Prove It. Secure It. Get a demo today.

Additional note on CSF

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 provides valuable guidance to industries, government agencies, and other organizations for managing cybersecurity risks. “Developed by working closely with stakeholders and reflecting the most recent cybersecurity challenges and management practices, this update aims to make the framework even more relevant to a wider swath of users in the United States and abroad,” according to Kevin Stine, chief of NIST’s Applied Cybersecurity Division.