Most ISPM tools are built around configuration. They'll tell you a non-human identity has excessive permissions or hasn't been rotated in 90 days, but they won't tell you it's actively doing something outside its normal pattern.

A CISO recently told me every NHI vendor he'd evaluated was telling the same story: we can see your service accounts, classify them, and surface the ones with risky permissions. Useful. Not sufficient. The gap isn't in inventory. It's in what happens after you've built the list.

The NHI surface is expanding. AI agents, OAuth tokens, and API keys are multiplying faster than most teams can classify them. Service accounts remain the most exploited layer, accumulated over decades with far less behavioral visibility than most organizations realize.

ISPM reduces your identity attack surface: excessive permissions, stale accounts, privilege sprawl. Most tools handle that well. What they don't do is tell you when a service account with a clean posture profile starts behaving unexpectedly.

Stop at the first and you'll miss the breach that happens in the second.

Abnormal applies the same behavioral model it uses for human accounts to service accounts: a baseline for when this identity authenticates, from which IPs, what it accesses. When something deviates, you know before it becomes a breach.

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