Cybersecurity In-Depth: Feature articles on security strategy, latest trends, and people to know.
Security researcher Aleksandr Krasnov reveals dormant non-human identities can create security blind spots and releases NHI Hound, an open source tool to sniff out trust paths.
July 28, 2026
A seemingly minor insider incident last year involving a small, isolated cloud account turned out to be a harbinger of a potentially larger identity problem. When an AI‑enabled workflow agent that had been idle for 30 days suddenly woke up and began firing off API calls at unusual times, it triggered an anomaly investigation.
During the course of the investigation, Aleksandr Krasnov, a distinguished security architect at Ducker Tech Consulting, discovered a mesh of "ghost credentials" and non‑human identities — tokens, agents, and service accounts that lived outside traditional trust boundaries but were still able to move laterally through the environment and escalate privileges to access systems. Krasnov declined to describe specifics of the incident, but he says it exposed a much larger blind spot: organizations have lost track of what and who they trust in heavily automated, AI‑based environments.
