Introduction
Shared user accounts – a single set of credentials used by multiple people – remain common across organizations and teams. Many groups share administrator, service, or “team” logins so that multiple staff can perform required tasks using the same account, often with elevated privileges. This practice is frequently driven by convenience and cost considerations. Using one account can streamline access (for example, shift workers sharing a generic login) and reduce the number of passwords or licenses to manage.
In practice, shared accounts are seen as simpler and more cost-effective: one password is easier to remember than many, and a single account can reduce per-user software license costs. In some cases, legacy applications, appliances, or vendor portals only support a single administrative login, effectively forcing account sharing.
Finally, shared accounts often persist because people optimize for getting work done – sharing credentials informally even when policies prohibit it – especially when the “right way” is slower, unclear, or blocked by tooling limitations. For these reasons, shared credentials may appear to enhance coordination and efficiency. However, these short-term benefits come at a significant security price.
Reasons Behind Widespread Use of Shared Accounts
Even though best practices advise against it, organizations continue to use shared accounts for several practical reasons.
Ease of Access and Collaboration
A shared account provides one access point for a team, which can speed up coordination. Teams can quickly log into a system or application without requesting individual access each time. For example, an IT helpdesk might use a common account to monitor a dashboard, or multiple administrators might share a root login for expediency.
Cost Savings on Licenses
Some companies use one account for multiple users specifically to save money on software licensing or account fees. Rather than paying for separate user licenses, they let several employees share a login to cut costs. This is seen with certain enterprise software or SaaS subscriptions where licensing is costly per user.
Temporary or Multi-User Roles
In environments with high turnover or temporary staff (e.g. contractors, interns, or frontline workers), creating individual accounts for each person can be burdensome. A shared account can be a “quick setup” for short-term staff or for a group that collectively performs one function. For instance, a generic email account (like support@company.com) might be accessed by a rotating team of employees. Using a single login in such cases is sometimes viewed as the simplest solution to give everyone the needed access.
While these factors explain why shared accounts persist in enterprises, they do not outweigh the serious security trade-offs. Compliance standards explicitly discourage or prohibit shared credentials because they undermine security controls. The next section details the key vulnerabilities and risks introduced by account sharing.
Policy Workarounds and “Getting Things Done” Behavior
In many organizations, shared accounts persist even when policies explicitly prohibit them because users and teams optimize for speed and continuity over governance. When the “approved” access path is slow, unclear, or blocked by tooling limitations (e.g., long lead times to provision accounts, licensing friction, or legacy apps with awkward admin flows), people create informal workarounds – forwarding credentials in chat, keeping them in spreadsheets, or reusing a known login to avoid downtime. Over time, these exceptions become normalized operational behavior, and the shared account turns into “how things are done,” regardless of written policies.
Security Vulnerabilities and Risks of Shared Accounts
Despite their convenience, shared accounts introduce significant security vulnerabilities. Organizations have learned (sometimes the hard way) that these accounts create weaknesses in access control, auditing, and compliance. Below are the primary risks associated with shared account usage.
Loss of Accountability and Audit Trail
When multiple people use the same login, it becomes impossible to tell who did what. Shared accounts obscure individual user actions, providing partial or full anonymity to those who use them. Audit logs will show activity under the shared username, but cannot pinpoint which person was responsible. This lack of accountability (a violation of the security principle of non-repudiation) is dangerous.
For example, if a shared IT admin account is used to log in at 3 AM and perform malicious changes, one cannot prove which of the several authorized users actually did it. The inability to attribute actions to an individual not only hinders incident investigations but also removes a deterrent to insider misuse – users may behave less cautiously if they know their actions can’t be traced uniquely to them.
Offboarding Risk (Least-Privilege Violations)
Shared accounts inherently conflict with the principle of least privilege. Typically, these accounts are given broad or administrative rights so multiple people can do various tasks – meaning each user with the password often has more access than they personally require. This over-privileging increases the blast radius of any one user’s mistake or compromise.
Furthermore, managing access is all-or-nothing: anyone with the credentials gains the same level of access. It’s difficult to enforce granular controls or tailor permissions per person on a shared login, since all users share the same role and privileges. Revoking access for one individual is also cumbersome – you can’t simply disable that person’s account, but instead must rotate the shared password, impacting everyone who uses the account and adding direct cost and operational overhead every time an employee is off-boarded.
Many breaches have occurred because organizations neglected to change a shared admin password promptly after a staff member left, leaving former employees with undetected access.
Password Management and Credential Leakage
By design, a shared password is known to multiple people, which multiplies the chances of it being mishandled or stolen. The more people who know a secret, the harder it is to keep – and a shared account’s credentials are no exception. Such passwords are often written down or stored insecurely (on sticky notes, in spreadsheets, or shared docs) so that the team can reference them.
This means an attacker has more opportunities to discover the password, whether through phishing one of the users, finding where it’s written, or guessing a commonly shared credential. If any one user with access falls for a phishing email or has their device compromised, the shared account credentials can be exposed, instantly compromising the entire account for all uses. Shared accounts therefore expand the attack surface: multiple users (each a potential vulnerability) and often laxer handling of the password.
Moreover, because changing the password affects many people, organizations might delay rotations – resulting in long-lived credentials that attackers can exploit.
Detection and Incident Response Difficulties
Shared accounts complicate security monitoring and incident response. If an anomalous login or action is observed on a shared account, security teams cannot immediately determine who is behind it. Crucial time may be lost trying to track down which user (of many) was using the account at that moment.
Additionally, malicious changes can go unnoticed in a shared environment – for example, if multiple people share a server login, one might introduce a rogue file or change and others might assume a teammate did it legitimately. This ambiguity hinders threat detection. Forensic analysis after an incident is also hampered, since attributing events to an individual requires correlating other clues (such as IP addresses or work schedules) rather than a straightforward log entry of a unique user. Overall, the lack of clear ownership in shared accounts makes it harder to spot and contain security breaches in a timely manner.
In summary, while shared accounts might fulfill short-term operational needs, they present serious risks in enterprise environments. They weaken access control, undermine auditability, increase the likelihood of credential compromise, lack MFA, and run afoul of security best practices and compliance mandates. These vulnerabilities underscore the importance of managing shared accounts very carefully – or better yet, avoiding them whenever possible.
Mitigation Strategies using Unixi SSO
Given the risks, organizations should take proactive steps to reduce or eliminate the dangers of shared accounts. Below are best practices and mitigation strategies that enterprise IT departments can start adopting.
Minimize or Eliminate Shared Accounts
The most straightforward mitigation is to avoid using shared logins whenever possible. Each user should have their own unique account for accountability. Many tasks that used to be done via shared accounts (like a common admin user) can be accomplished through individual accounts with appropriate permissions or by using group memberships. If a shared credential is not absolutely necessary, phase it out in favor of unique user IDs. This immediately improves traceability and compliance.
With Unixi Universal SSO, organizations can eliminate password sharing altogether because users no longer know or “own” application passwords in the first place – access is driven by their IdP identity and enforced by policy. If sharing an account is absolutely a must, then sharing stops being “password sharing” entirely: every user accesses the shared account through their own IdP identity, while Unixi’s KDA-based flow enables the shared-account session without ever exposing or distributing a reusable secret. This turns shared access from an unmanaged liability into a centrally governed control – group-scoped, instantly revocable, and fully attributable.
Document, Monitor and Audit Shared Accounts
Treat shared accounts as high-risk assets that demand oversight. Maintain an up-to-date record of all shared accounts in the organization, including details on who has access, who is responsible for managing them, and why the account exists. Conduct regular audits of these accounts to ensure the credentials haven’t been misused or changed without authorization. It is advisable to set up logging and alerting specifically for shared account usage. For example, generate an alert if a critical shared admin account is used outside of business hours or from an unusual location.
When your organization is using Unixi SSO, every invocation of a shared credential is recorded with who, when, from where, and to which app. Logs can stream to SIEM platforms, so you regain full user-level accountability even for the most outdated application.
Enforce Strong Authentication and Security for Shared Logins
If a shared account must be used, protect it with the strongest possible authentication measures. At minimum, require a strong, unique password that is changed regularly and not reused elsewhere. Enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) on shared accounts can be challenging (since multiple people would need access to the second factor).
With Unixi, the user completes the IdP’s MFA before the extension can act and users can access any account, shared or otherwise. Unixi can also require an extra step-up MFA prompt right before the SSO for a shared account is granted, giving the shared account an additional MFA gate.
Rapid Offboarding and Rotation
Traditionally, the best practice is to always change the password or keys immediately when someone with shared access leaves or no longer needs it. An administrator has to have a defined process to update credentials and inform remaining users (ideally via the password manager) so that there is no lapse in security. Some organizations set predetermined intervals (e.g. quarterly) to rotate shared account passwords regardless, as a safety net. Frequent rotation limits the window of opportunity for an ex-employee or an attacker who might have obtained the old credentials.
When Unixi is responsible for the SSO, an administrator can disable or delete the user in the IdP (or drop them from the mapped group) and the user immediately loses access to all shared accounts. No scramble to rotate a stored password – access stops the moment their personal identity is deprovisioned.
User Education and Policy Enforcement
Educate all users, especially IT staff, about the dangers of password sharing and the proper handling of shared credentials. Establish a clear policy that defines when shared accounts are permitted and how they must be managed.
Unixi makes sharing safe and controllable by removing the need to store, distribute or expose the reusable password. The education effort therefore shifts away from trying to police end-users’ behavior, and toward internal IT enablement: training administrators on how to configure shared accounts per application in Unixi, scope access via IdP groups, define approvals, and use the audit trail – so shared access is governed by policy and tooling rather than informal human processes.
By implementing the above strategies, organizations can greatly mitigate the security risks associated with shared accounts. In many cases, the best practice is to phase out shared accounts entirely in favor of unique, auditable identities. However, for those scenarios where shared credentials remain (due to technical or business constraints), robust controls like Unixi’s Universal SSO can reduce exposure and regain control and visibility over account usage.
