Organizations spend considerable effort protecting administrator accounts while overlooking another category of identity: service accounts.
These non-human identities run applications, automation, integrations, backup jobs, cloud workloads, and scheduled processes. Because they operate without human interaction, they may have long-lived credentials and permissions that are rarely reviewed.
That combination makes them attractive attack targets.
A penetration test should first identify what service accounts can actually access. This includes databases, cloud resources, APIs, file shares, application administration functions, secrets stores, and other identities they can assume.
The next step is determining whether those credentials can be obtained from realistic attacker positions.
Testers may examine application configuration, exposed secrets, CI/CD systems, repositories, environment variables, credential stores, backup files, or compromised workloads. The objective is not simply to find a password or token. It is to establish what happens after the credential is obtained.
A service account with read access to one application may appear low risk. But if that account can retrieve a secret used by another service, assume a privileged cloud role, or authenticate to an administrative system, it becomes part of a larger attack path.
Privilege escalation can also occur through relationships between service identities. An attacker who compromises one workload may be able to access another workload's identity or exploit trust between services.
This is increasingly relevant in cloud environments, where workload identities and service accounts frequently replace traditional machine credentials. Current cloud threat research continues to identify identity and privilege weaknesses as major contributors to compromise.
A strong penetration test therefore treats service accounts as attackable identities, not background configuration.