The Real-World Scenario
When a regional bank conducted a post-incident audit during a suspected internal fraud case, they discovered a problem they hadn’t accounted for: over 120 shared mailboxes and 35 service accounts were actively used by multiple teams — but none were properly governed.
- No ownership had been assigned.
- No MFA was enforced.
- No logs existed to trace who accessed them and when.
Some accounts had elevated privileges to access core banking systems, customer communications, and payment gateways — yet they were treated as “IT plumbing” rather than privileged identities.
Why This Matters
Shared and service accounts are often overlooked in IAM programs because they don’t belong to a person. But that’s exactly what makes them dangerous.
Shared mailboxes used by teams like Finance, Support, or HR often handle sensitive data.
Service accounts used for integrations or scheduled jobs are frequently over-permissioned, never rotated, and rarely monitored.
In this bank’s case, the inability to track access to these accounts delayed the investigation by weeks, created regulatory reporting challenges, and exposed critical gaps in audit readiness.
What Leading Organizations Do Differently
Forward-thinking organizations are extending identity governance to cover non-human and shared identities with the same rigor as user accounts.
With solutions like BAAR-IGA, they:
- Bring shared accounts under governance – assigning ownership, applying lifecycle policies, and tagging risk levels.
- Track and audit every access – integrating with logs, SIEM, and PAM tools to ensure traceability.
- Enforce controls like MFA and just-in-time access – even on shared or automated accounts.
- Generate automated evidence – to support audits for standards like RBI, IRDAI, SOC2, and ISO 27001.
Final Thought
- Just because an account is shared doesn’t mean it should be invisible.
- Every identity — whether it belongs to a person, mailbox, or script — represents access to sensitive systems.
- And access without accountability is a security breach waiting to happen.
- With BAAR-IGA, every identity tells a story. And every story is tracked, governed, and audit-ready.
