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What you are probably seeing
You see a growing list of active API keys or service tokens in your dashboard that you no longer remember assigning.
Your audit log shows an agent executing a write operation on a quiet Sunday night because its original permission was never revoked.
Why it happens
Most security tools were built for human users, so they assume a session is valid until the person explicitly logs out or an admin manually disables the account.
Automated agents are designed to run continuously, which means a standard session token remains active indefinitely unless the system has a specific mechanism to kill idle or unused credentials.
What changed recently
Step by step
1. List every automated integration and identify which ones hold persistent credentials that never expire by default.
2. Enable the short-lived token feature in your identity provider so that access passes are issued for a fixed window instead of years.
3. Configure your cloud infrastructure to automatically rotate these temporary tokens before they reach their expiration date.
4. Set up an alert that triggers immediately if an agent attempts to act after its credential has expired.
5. Review your audit logs weekly to confirm that no agent is executing actions with a long-standing static key.
Ways to go further
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