How Demo and Test Accounts Are Getting Us into Trouble: The Truth About All of Our Environments

Martin Snyder
Jun 17
3 min read

Updated: Jun 26

If you’ve ever spun up a test account to check out a new tool, you’re not alone. From engineers and IT teams to security and product managers, everyone needs to validate, test, and demonstrate technology before rolling it out to the business. It’s how modern organizations operate—and it’s a major factor driving the rapid growth of SaaS adoption.

But here’s the problem: Those accounts don’t just disappear when we’re done with them.

Instead, they lurk in our environments—often with weak credentials, elevated admin privileges, or access to sensitive data—completely invisible to IT and security teams. These forgotten credentials are precisely the hidden backdoors that attackers love to exploit. Now is the time to prioritize securing test and demo accounts in your IT and SaaS environments.

The Reality We Don’t Talk About

Every organization, large or small, has test and demo accounts scattered throughout its SaaS ecosystem. Whether it’s a test integration, a proof-of-concept deployment, or a sales demo, these accounts serve a short-term purpose but often fade from memory almost instantly.

Because they aren’t tied to an active employee, these accounts typically don’t receive the same security controls as production accounts. There’s often:

No strong password enforcement
No multi-factor authentication (MFA)
No regular audits or access reviews
No automatic offboarding when the project ends

And if you think attackers aren’t aware of this, think again. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report, “unmanaged identities” are one of the leading causes of data breaches across industries.

The Zscaler “Breach”: A Wake-Up Call

Let’s talk about a recent example: the Zscaler “breach”. Headlines made it sound severe, but the reality was more nuanced—an unused test account was compromised. Not a customer account, not a production system. Just a forgotten test credential.

Still, it made the news, caused concern, and raised questions about SaaS security practices. This is the hidden power—and danger—of unmanaged demo and test accounts. What seems small can create massive reputational and operational risk.

Why IT and Security Don’t See Them

So why do these accounts keep slipping through the cracks? It’s because they’re often created outside of formal identity and access management (IAM) processes:

They don’t show up in user directories — Test accounts aren’t associated with real employees, so they don’t appear in onboarding or offboarding workflows.
They don’t get flagged in security audits — Unless your security team is actively searching for them, these accounts remain hidden.
They don’t get rotated or cleaned up — A test account created for a single project can persist for months or years, completely forgotten.

This isn’t just an IT problem—it’s a business-wide security challenge.

What Can We Do About It?

Ignoring the issue is no longer an option. If a test account compromise can make headlines for a leading security company, it can happen to anyone. So, how do we fix it?

1. Discovery: Find Your Hidden Accounts

You can’t secure what you don’t know exists. Use automated SaaS discovery tools to scan your environments for orphaned, unknown, and inactive accounts.Waldo Security’s SaaS Discovery helps organizations gain real visibility into all connected SaaS accounts—including test and demo accounts—across your environment.

2. Enforce Policies for Test Accounts

Require all test accounts to be created through IT, with proper tracking, expiration dates, and role-based access controls. The National Cyber Security Centre recommends policy enforcement and monitoring for all identities—including non-human and temporary accounts.

3. Audit and Remove Regularly

Set a recurring schedule to review and delete unused test accounts, ideally every 30 or 60 days. Integrating these checks into your SaaS governance framework makes clean-up routine.

4. Treat Test Accounts Like Production Accounts

Require strong passwords, enable MFA, and restrict access as you would with any user account. The CIS Controls offer industry-standard recommendations for protecting all identities.

5. Monitor and Remediate OAuth Grants

Test accounts frequently approve OAuth access to critical SaaS apps. Tools like Waldo Security’s OAuth Risk Scanner reveal risky, unused, or abandoned connections—helping you shut down hidden exposures before they become incidents.

The Bottom Line

Test and demo accounts aren’t just a convenience—they’re a risk. Unless we start treating them with the same security scrutiny as every other account, they’ll remain a weak link in every environment.

The Zscaler incident is a reminder: even the most mature security organizations can get caught off guard by something as simple as a forgotten test account.

The question is:

Will we learn from it—or be the next headline?

Want to see how many test and demo accounts are hiding in your SaaS stack? Try Waldo Security’s free discovery tool today.

Further reading:

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