The Hidden Risks of Inactive User Accounts And How to Mitigate Them

Not every cyberattack starts with sophisticated malware or nation-state hackers. Sometimes, the door is left wide open by something as simple as an inactive user account.

Take the recent case of a U.S. state government organization that was breached through an ex-employee’s account. A threat actor got hold of leaked credentials from a former staff member and used them to log in through the organization’s VPN. This isn’t an isolated event.

According to PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey, 89% of employees and 88% of consumers want companies to disclose data privacy and AI governance frameworks—but only 32% of executives report that their companies actually do.

Trust gaps like these only get worse after a breach. Customers don’t forgive easily when they discover their data was exposed because of something as preventable as a dormant user account. This is just one of the risks of inactive user accounts.

In this article, we’ll break down what counts as an inactive user, why stale user accounts are such an overlooked security hole, and how IT, security, and compliance teams can build better defenses against them.

TLDR

• Inactive accounts are credentials that are no longer actively used, and include dormant, stale, or orphaned accounts.
• They’re risky because attackers—or even insiders—can exploit them to move laterally, access sensitive data, and bypass security controls.
• Inactive user accounts are left over from incomplete offboarding, role changes, shadow IT, and leftover test or contractor accounts.
• Mitigation includes centralized identity management, automated deprovisioning, and regular access reviews.
• Tools like Stitchflow can help you detect, flag, and help remove these accounts across SaaS apps, including non-SSO/SCIM, disconnected apps, and shadow IT.

What are inactive user accounts?

Inactive user accounts are credentials that still exist in a system but are no longer being actively used by their owners. Left unchecked, these inactive accounts become entry points for attackers because they’re rarely monitored and often overlooked during audits.

You can think about them in three ways:

• Dormant accounts: These are unused for 30–90 days, but still tied to a current employee. The person still works at the company; they just haven’t logged into that system recently.
• Stale accounts: Anything that’s been untouched for 6+ months, often forgotten after a role change, project wrap-up, or secondary tool that’s no longer needed.
• Orphaned accounts: These are left behind when someone leaves the organization. These have no legitimate owner but may still carry their old permissions.

All three categories pose risks, but orphaned accounts are the most dangerous. With no owner and no oversight, they provide attackers with direct, unauthorized access to sensitive systems.

How risky inactive user accounts are — and how hard they are to manage — depends a lot on the environment they live in.

A mix of cloud and on-prem. These are the hardest to secure because identity data lives in multiple places. Sync delays, inconsistent policies, and offboarding gaps can all create openings for attackers to exploit orphaned accounts.

‼️On-prem Active Directory vs. decentralized SaaS user management: Active Directory gives you a single source of truth: one place to disable users, unified policies, and domain-wide visibility. By contrast, SaaS platforms each run their own user databases. Deactivation is fragmented, visibility is limited, and lifecycle management depends on APIs or manual effort.

That’s why inactive accounts are easier to catch in AD but more likely to persist as stale or orphaned accounts in SaaS apps.

How are inactive accounts created?

Inactive accounts rarely emerge by design—they're typically the byproduct of organizational processes that fail to properly manage the complete user lifecycle. Understanding how these accounts originate is crucial for preventing their accumulation.

Partial offboarding

When employees leave, their access is often shut down in one place but left open in others. HR may disable the main Active Directory account, but SaaS apps, cloud platforms, and legacy systems stay untouched. With no central view of every account, it’s easy for some to slip through, and ex-employees end up keeping access long after they’ve gone.

‼️ Service and shared accounts add to the problem. These are created for systems, automation, or shared mailboxes and often persist after the systems or processes are retired. Without clear ownership, they are rarely cleaned up, making them another hidden risk.

📚Also read: How to automate employee offboarding

Role changes and promotions

When employees switch departments or move up, their access usually grows but rarely shrinks. New permissions are added while old ones remain. Temporary project access often sticks around long after the project ends. Managers also sometimes hesitate to revoke rights in case they’re needed later.

Over time, this hoarding effect creates bloated permission sets where many accounts sit unused.

Mergers and acquisitions

When companies merge, account sprawl is common. Employees from the acquired firm often receive new accounts but still keep their old ones. Duplicate logins remain across services, and those who leave during integration may never have their access revoked. Service accounts tied to outdated systems are also left running, adding to the mess.

Shadow IT

Employees often create accounts in tools outside official IT oversight. They use corporate email addresses to sign up for productivity apps, development platforms, file-sharing services, or personal AI tools. These accounts usually remain invisible until a breach, audit, or automated scan exposes them.

The scale of this “shadow AI” is astounding. According to the 2025 MIT NANDA Report, while only 40% of companies report purchasing official AI subscriptions, over 90% of employees in a survey said they regularly use LLM tools for work.

Brands with LLM subscritption vs. Employees using LLM; Source: The MIT NANDA Report

Many of these accounts exist outside IT’s view and can quickly become inactive accounts if users stop using them, yet still retain access, permissions, and potential risk.

Contractors and vendors

External users often need access for projects, audits, or integrations. The problem comes when their contracts end, but their accounts stay active. Because contractors and vendors are not tied to HR systems, their access does not automatically expire. Responsibility is also split across departments, making it unclear who should revoke permissions.

⚠️A recent example is the Tangerine breach in February 2024, which traced back to the login credentials of a single contractor. Those credentials still worked on a legacy database that should have been retired. The result was the exposure of personal data for more than 230,000 customers.

📚Also read: How to securely offboard vendors (+ Free checklist)

Test accounts

Test and development accounts have a way of sticking around long after they’re needed. They’re created for a short-term project but often end up with elevated permissions, accidentally used in production, or replicated across multiple environments. Many remain active long after the project ends, quietly creating risk.

⚠️Case in point: The Microsoft security team detected an attack in January 2024 that involved compromised credentials, including temporary or test accounts in the corporate email system. These accounts still had access to internal systems, source code repositories, and other sensitive assets, allowing attackers to attempt lateral movement across the network.

Risks of inactive user accounts

The risks of inactive user accounts are often underestimated. However, these credentials create multiple risk vectors that can compromise security, compliance, operations, and financial stability.

Security risks

Inactive accounts weaken security in two main ways. They expand the attack surface, and they often lack modern protections like multi-factor authentication. Both issues give attackers quiet, low-resistance entry points that are easy to miss.

• Account takeover: Accounts spread across many systems leave unused credentials behind. And because there’s no normal activity baseline, unusual logins often go undetected.
• Multi-factor authentication gap: Inactive accounts are far less likely to have MFA enabled. Some predate rollout, others belong to ex-employees or systems that never supported it.

According to Google, inactive accounts that haven’t been accessed for long periods are more likely to be compromised. The company explained:

“This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or reused passwords that may have been compromised, haven’t had two-factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user.”

Compliance risks

Inactive accounts don’t just create technical vulnerabilities—they cascade into compliance failures with costly legal and financial consequences. Regulators expect organizations to tightly control who has access to sensitive systems and data. Dormant accounts undermine this expectation in several ways:

• Data exposure: Forgotten accounts often still touch sensitive datasets
• Audit trail gaps: With no active user, it’s nearly impossible to validate legitimate use
• Regulatory penalties: GDPR fines can reach up to 4% of your annual revenue

Operational risks

Inactive accounts can create real operational headaches and threaten business continuity. They take up system resources, bloat databases, trigger unnecessary alerts, and make upgrades more complicated.

Many hold important documents, run automations, or connect different systems, so leaving them unattended can break workflows. Malicious ex-employees with lingering access can also exploit these accounts.

‼️A clear example is Eaton, where a former developer used his lingering Active Directory account to deploy malicious code, including a “kill switch” that crashed servers and locked out thousands of users, resulting in $360,000 in losses and over a year to fully restore operations.

Financial risks

Inactive accounts hit the budget in more ways than one. To start, they waste money on unused SaaS and security licenses, while also inflating costs for identity and access management tools.

Recently—a Stitchflow customer, Rula—found more than 200 orphaned SaaS accounts, mainly from contractors who’d moved on.

And if an inactive account is compromised, the fallout multiplies—breach response, legal fees, forensics, and regulatory actions can quickly turn a small oversight into a major financial drain.

⚠️Regulated industries like healthcare and finance might face more risk: For example, in healthcare, dormant EHR and telehealth accounts can expose patient data and violate HIPAA requirements. Inactive accounts in financial services, on the other hand, can directly violate frameworks like SOX, PCI DSS, and GLBA.

How inactive accounts are dangerous

Even without active use, these accounts can be exploited to gain access, move laterally, and extract sensitive data.

• SSO amplification: Even if an account looks inactive, its Single Sign-On (SSO) access can still open doors to multiple apps at once—so one compromised account can cause a lot of trouble.
• Persistent tokens and API keys: Things like SAML tokens, OAuth credentials, or API keys can keep working long after someone leaves, letting attackers sneak in without tripping normal login alerts.
• Automation risks: Workflows set up by former employees can keep running, moving sensitive data around automatically—even when no one’s watching.
• Access to sensitive data: Low-privilege accounts might seem harmless, but they can still touch PII, financial records, or proprietary info that attackers can piece together to reach bigger targets.
• Insider threat potential: Ex-employees or contractors with leftover access can deliberately mess with systems or steal critical data if they want to.

How to discover inactive user accounts

On-premise environments have a clear advantage: centralized control allows IT teams to use scripts, database queries, and log analysis to track user activity efficiently, and changes propagate consistently across the network.

SaaS-heavy environments, by contrast, scatter accounts across dozens—or even hundreds—of platforms. Each platform may use different authentication methods, logging formats, or APIs, and activity metrics aren’t standardized. This makes manual discovery slow, error-prone, and often incomplete.

Tracking inactive accounts in SaaS requires a multi-pronged approach:

• Usage monitoring: Checking login, feature engagement, and license consumption data to see who is truly active.
• Last-login aggregation: Combining login data across platforms, including SSO-connected apps.
• API-based activity collection: Pulling structured metrics from SaaS APIs for consistent reporting.
• HRIS and IDP cross-checks: Comparing employment or contractor status with active accounts to identify orphaned access.

The challenge with manually tracking inactive SaaS accounts

Even with all the right data sources, discovering inactive SaaS accounts can be a chore. Platforms vary in reporting capabilities, API access is limited or rate-limited, and activity metrics don’t always reflect actual usage—for example, background token refreshes can appear as logins.

Here’s where modern SaaS management tools—like Stitchflow—come in. Not only do these tools automate the discovery of inactive accounts and handle tasks like provisioning and deprovisioning, but they also:

• Aggregate activity across SSO, APIs, and platform logs
• Integrate with HRIS/IDP systems to verify offboarding and role changes
• Notify you about dormant or orphaned accounts
• Provide insights into license utilization to uncover unused seats

Essentially, they bring to SaaS what on-prem environments have long had: centralized visibility, comprehensive activity tracking, and automated enforcement.

Best practices to reduce inactive user accounts

Inactive accounts are inevitable, but their risks can be dramatically reduced with proactive identity and access management. Here are some tips:

Identity management

Centralize access management across all applications—including non-SSO and legacy systems—so every account, from core enterprise apps to niche SaaS tools, is visible in one place.

Set up automated workflows to pull HR or IDP data to trigger immediate deprovisioning when employees leave or change roles. And with Shadow IT so prominent, we recommend using a SaaS user management tool that also provides visibility into disconnected apps.

One way to approach this is through what we think of as a “Single Pane of Glass”: aggregating activity from all SaaS applications into a unified, real-time view. This kind of dashboard lets IT teams monitor SSO activity, API calls, platform logins, and license usage all in one place, making it much easier to spot inactive or orphaned accounts before they become a risk.

Stitchflow’s single pane of glass

👉Use Stitchflow’s free Shadow IT scanner to discover all employee-used apps and identify potential risks before they become issues.

Monitor access

Keep a close eye on who can access what. Start with regular access reviews to catch inactive or forgotten accounts. Don’t forget legacy systems or disconnected apps—gaps there can turn into easy targets for attackers.

👉Need a quick snapshot of user access without a full SaaS management platform? Try the Stitchflow User Access Review (UAR) service—your first report is free.

You can also set different inactivity thresholds for different roles, so you know when an account should be flagged. Another tip is to ensure your offboarding process disables accounts quickly when employees leave or change roles.

Special policies for special accounts

Treating all accounts the same can leave security gaps and create operational headaches. Contractors, shared users, and legacy accounts each require tailored rules and monitoring to ensure security, compliance, and operational efficiency.

• Contractor accounts are temporary by nature, but without strict expiration controls, they can linger long after a project ends. Here, you need to tie account provisioning to contract management systems and enforce least-privilege access.
• Shared accounts aren’t temporary, but they introduce a different problem: no single user owns the account. Password changes affect multiple people, and unusual activity can be hard to trace. We suggest centralizing credentials in a password manager and monitoring feature usage instead of just logins.
• Accounts from legacy systems or acquired companies often carry permissions that were once justified but now pose security and compliance risks. Handle these by documenting original purposes, mapping permissions to current security standards, and gradually migrating them into the modern identity framework.

💡Create an AI use policy: Just as with special accounts, AI tools can introduce unique risks. Establishing an AI policy ensures responsible usage, protects sensitive data, and aligns AI workflows with your overall security and compliance framework.

Set financial controls

Unused or misassigned licenses are more than just wasted money—they’re a hidden risk. Regularly review license allocation across your SaaS portfolio and reclaim seats that aren’t actively used. This not only saves costs but also reduces the number of dormant accounts that could be exploited.

⚠️Don’t forget internal role changes: Employees moving to new roles may retain licenses they no longer need. Since these accounts often skip formal offboarding for specific tools, they can quietly remain active.

How Stitchflow prevents inactive user accounts

Inactive accounts aren’t just clutter—they’re gateways for breaches, compliance gaps, and wasted spend. Stitchflow addresses the blind spots that identity providers, workflows, and manual processes often miss.

With Stitchflow, IT teams get:

• Unified visibility: Every user and account—SSO apps, disconnected tools, contractors, and legacy systems—comes together in a single, real-time view. No hidden, duplicate, or orphaned accounts slip through.
• Continuous auditing: Dormant, hidden, or suspicious accounts are flagged automatically. Alerts highlight exactly where risk sits—whether it’s an ex-contractor in Salesforce or a shadow AI tool tied to a departed employee.
• Actionable remediation: One-click cleanups, automated ITSM ticketing, or license reclamation surveys prevent inactive accounts from lingering. Teams can choose to automate or review before acting.
• Cost optimization: Reclaim unused licenses, avoid the $10+/user/month “SSO tax,” and stop paying for dormant seats.

Instead of manually chasing accounts across 100+ apps, Stitchflow maintains an always-current IT graph that reconciles access for you.

Book a free pilot, and eliminate inactive accounts before they become a risk.