A service account is a non-human identity used by applications, scripts, and services to authenticate and interact with other systems — often with elevated privileges that persist indefinitely.
⚙️ How Does It Work?
Service accounts are secured through PAM: rotating credentials, limiting permissions to least privilege, monitoring usage, and replacing long-lived passwords with short-lived dynamic credentials or managed identities.
📍 Where Is It Used?
Every enterprise IT environment — databases, middleware, scheduled tasks, CI/CD pipelines, cloud workloads.
💡 Real-World Example
A company discovers 500 service accounts, many with domain admin privileges and passwords unchanged for 7 years. A PAM audit reveals 60% are for decommissioned applications. The cleanup dramatically reduces the attack surface.
🔗 Related Terms
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