What is an Orphan Account? Meaning, Risks, and Solutions

The name says it all when it comes to orphan accounts: these are user accounts that have been abandoned. For some reason or another, these user accounts retain access to applications and systems on a network without actively being used by a current member of an organization.

This can occur after an employee or contracted worker leaves an organization or changes roles within that organization, and can pose serious cybersecurity threats, leading to a whole host of potential risks for a company’s security.

This article will take a close examination into orphaned accounts and how companies can protect themselves from this threat.

What is an Orphan Account?

Orphaned accounts describe accounts without an associated active user, and the ‘active’ adjective is critical. Active identities are those who have current responsibilities within an organization, be it as a full- or part-time employee, third-party contractor, machine identity, or otherwise.

Many identities require a variety of accounts to access different applications or data sets, as their tasks may vary based on their job function at that moment. However, when employees (or machine identities) are no longer working in a particular role or at the organization altogether, those accounts (and their associated permissions) still may exist in the active directory. This is one example of an orphaned account that can plague organizations, causing security, efficiency, and compliance risks.

Orphaned accounts present easy, and sought-after targets for attackers because these accounts are some combination of unowned, over-provisioned, and under-monitored. As such, their existence is often a key component of many security audits. There are several key identity governance practices that organizations should practice to improve security and meet compliance and audit mandates.

How Are Orphan Accounts Created?

Orphan accounts are typically created during employee turnover, mergers and acquisitions, role changes or reorganizations, system upgrades, and migrations. This can be due to many factors such as oversights, miscommunications between HR teams and IT teams, delayed offboarding processes, etc.

Some organizational changes like growth and scaling, lack of clear ownership, inadequate offboarding processes, or third-party relationships with contractors, vendors, and other external parties can lead to orphaned accounts being created as they may have been granted access and left behind accounts after completing their assignments.

Difference Between Orphan Accounts, Zombie Accounts, and Abandoned Accounts

While orphan, zombie, and abandoned accounts may seem similar at a glance due to their inactive status, they differ in their origins, characteristics, and potential security implications.

While orphan accounts are accounts within a system that have no active owner or manager, typically because the original user has left the organization or role, zombie accounts appear inactive or deactivated but still execute tasks or retain access in the background due to incomplete or flawed deactivation processes. On the other hand, abandoned accounts were deliberately created but are no longer in use, either because the user stopped using the system or never returned after initial registration.

Risks Associated With Orphan Accounts

Orphan accounts pose significant cybersecurity threats as they often retain access to sensitive systems or data without active oversight. These unmanaged accounts are prime targets for malicious actors seeking unauthorized entry, enabling data breaches, insider threats, or ransomware attacks.

Financially, businesses lose a lot of money through data breaches, which can be escalated even further with orphan account exploitation. Reputationally, such breaches damage customer trust, tarnish brand credibility, and may lead to regulatory penalties for non-compliance with data protection laws like GDPR. Regular audits and account lifecycle management are essential to mitigating these risks.

Compliance and Regulatory Implications

Orphan accounts jeopardize compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 by creating untracked access points that violate data protection and access control standards. Their existence complicates audits and reporting, as these accounts often lack clear ownership or activity logs, leading to potential fines, legal liabilities, and reputational damage. Proactive account management is crucial to ensure regulatory adherence and mitigate audit challenges.

Potential Attack Vectors

Malicious actors exploit orphan accounts through techniques like credential stuffing or using leaked credentials to access accounts, password guessing, and lateral movement to infiltrate systems and escalate privileges. Cybercriminals often perform reconnaissance using tools like open-source intelligence (OSINT) or network scanning to identify inactive but active accounts. These vulnerabilities provide a stealthy pathway to sensitive data or systems, bypassing conventional security measures.

How to Prevent and Eliminate Orphan Accounts

1. Continually Identify Orphaned Accounts

Security and IAM teams need to be hyper-vigilant in identifying accounts that are unused or otherwise unassociated with a current or active user. Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) tools can help in this respect through robust identity lifecycle management capabilities that automatically provision and deprovision access whenever someone joins, moves, or leaves a role in the organization.

A basic tip here would be to set this up for accounts associated with an AD (or Azure AD) user so that if someone leaves the organization, the accounts associated with that person are automatically decommissioned before they depart. The same goes for entire orphaned teams, like a department that was disbanded or a network of contractors that were removed from the company.

2. Determine the Desired State and Outcomes

For IAM teams, mapping out what the best result looks like for their company’s orphan accounts is critical. For some, that may mean eliminating them altogether, for others it can be re-assigning them. Then, setting up controls to continuously merge the ‘actual state’ of an orphaned account with the ‘desired state’ can help ensure success. This is how the Danish municipality of Varde was able to eliminate and avoid orphan accounts.

3. Certify and Recertify Access

Within IGA solutions, security and IAM leaders can easily set up access certification campaigns to quickly identify whether access is still active and/or whether it is still required. This process can help identify anomalous orphaned accounts that are still operating with privileges, but that may fall out of the purview of security teams. These surveys can (and should) be run regularly, with an increased cadence when trying to identify orphaned accounts with excessive privileges, or ones that have administrator rights.

4. Assign Ownership

Whether using attestation surveys and campaigns to assign ownership, identifying orphaned accounts to be deleted, or more, the most important thing to do is to start, and start quickly. An orphaned account that lingers can be a tremendous danger, with organizations in every industry facing fines, breaches, and more if they are not cleaned up so there should be some urgency here.

Prevent Orphaned Accounts With Omada

Our modern Identity Governance and Administration solution can help your organization avoid the risks of orphaned accounts by deprovisioning accounts as soon as they are not needed anymore. Learn more about how to get started by reading about the Omada Accelerator—a program to help organizations deploy IGA within 12 weeks and take control over the orphaned accounts across your heterogenous environment today—or book a demo today.