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Global Accelerated Learning • Est. 1999
Glossary Term Service Account

Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary

What is Service Account?

A service account is a non-human identity used by apps and automation to access resources, requiring least privilege and credential rotation to secure.

Glossary > Identity & Access Management > Service Account

Understanding Service Account

A service account is a non-human identity used by an application, service, script, or automated process to authenticate and access resources rather than being tied to an individual user. Because they often hold elevated privileges and persistent credentials that rarely change, service accounts are frequent targets for attackers seeking lateral movement and privilege escalation. Securing them requires least-privilege scoping, credential rotation, and monitoring, and increasingly the use of managed identities or short-lived tokens.

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