Most state and local government cybersecurity programs have gotten stronger at managing people. Multifactor authentication, single sign-on and periodic access reviews are now common in many government environments. But the identities attackers may care about most are often the ones no one is watching closely enough: nonhuman identities.
Nonhuman identities include service accounts, APIs, bots, automation scripts, certificates and AI agents that keep modern government systems running. In many environments, they already outnumber human users by a wide margin. They also tend to have long-lived credentials, broad permissions and limited oversight.
That is why nonhuman identities are becoming one of the most important identity risks in government, especially as digital identity management becomes more complex. If an attacker gets access to one exposed API key or one forgotten service account, there may be no phishing email, no MFA prompt and no obvious interactive login to investigate. The attacker can simply use the identity as designed.
For example, a developer might accidentally commit a cloud access key used by an overnight data import job to a shared code repository. If that key has permissions to read citizen records or modify storage, an attacker who finds it can access the environment programmatically, from anywhere, without triggering the usual user-focused controls.
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How Nonhuman Identities Create Risk in Government Systems
This is the mindset shift agencies need to make: Identity is no longer just about users. Identity is anything that can authenticate and access a system. If zero trust is the goal, then nonhuman identities need to be governed with the same seriousness as human accounts.
The good news is that agencies do not need to start with a massive transformation program. A practical first step is to pick one critical system and then inventory every service account and API key, assign an owner to each, and delete anything nobody claims. That alone can reduce risk quickly by removing orphaned access paths and forcing basic accountability.
From there, agencies can improve secrets management, reduce privilege, rotate credentials and move toward short-lived or secretless access patterns. But none of that happens until teams can answer a simple question: What nonhuman identities exist in the environment today?
Nonhuman identities may not be flashy, but they are quietly becoming one of the largest and least-governed attack surfaces in state and local government. The sooner agencies treat them as first-class identities, the better prepared they will be to secure modern digital services.
