The Creaking Floorboards: Legacy Apps That Groan

Deep in the house, you stumble across creaky, dust-covered apps, relics from another time. These are your legacy systems: the old tool built in 2004, the finance app no one dares to touch, the internal portal that still runs on Internet Explorer. Every click echoes like a warning.

These apps hold dark secrets: hardcoded passwords, outdated integrations, and no support for modern identity standards like SAML or OAuth. They weren’t built for zero trust or compliance frameworks, and they know it.

According to the GuidePoint Security / Ponemon IAM Maturity Report (2025), only half of organizations believe their identity programs are highly effective, and many still rely on manual access management. It’s no surprise these systems groan under the weight of their vulnerabilities, hoping no one hears them creak in the night.

Old apps don’t just age quietly- they haunt your infrastructure. And until someone shines a light on them, they’ll keep whispering from the basement.

The Ghostly Shadows: Orphaned Accounts

As you tiptoe deeper into the house, shadowy figures start to appear. They are not employees. They are orphaned accounts, left behind by people who moved on long ago. Their credentials still drift through the halls, holding keys to systems no one remembers.

These ghosts are more common than most realize. According to the same report, manual offboarding remains one of the weakest links in identity programs, with many organizations struggling to revoke access for departing users consistently. The result is a trail of forgotten identities that quietly linger, waiting for someone or something to find them.

They do not make noise. They do not break things. They just wait, invisible and alive, inside your network.

The Whispers Behind Locked Doors

Press your ear to a locked door and listen closely. The apps start to whisper. Some are old, some are new, but all of them have something to confess.

• “I’m not tied to your identity management system.”
• “I store passwords in plain text, oops.”
• “Multi-factor authentication? Not today.”

These are not ghost stories. They are warnings. Hidden inside your infrastructure are machine and service identities that no one fully controls. Each one has access, tokens, and permissions, but no clear owner.

The CyberArk 2025 State of Machine Identity Security Report found that machine identities now outnumber human identities by a wide margin. Yet, most organizations have no consistent way to manage or monitor them. Every one of those unseen identities is a whisper in the dark, a quiet door left unlocked.

If you listen closely enough, you will hear them too.

The Cobweb-Covered Attic: Shadow IT

Climb the rickety stairs to the attic, where the air feels colder and the light fades. This is where shadow IT lives. The apps your teams once downloaded “just to test.” The tools they connected for convenience. The ones no one ever documented.

They sit there now, gathering digital cobwebs, still humming quietly in the dark. Forgotten but active. Unseen but connected.

According to the Varonis 2024 Data Risk Report, more than half of enterprise applications operate outside official IT oversight, often without proper identity controls or visibility. Each one is a window left open, an entry point waiting for the wrong visitor to find it.

No one is watching this attic. No one is locking its doors. And yet, every attacker knows exactly where to look first.

Floodlights On: Banishing the Haunted House

Here’s the good news: flip on the floodlights, and the haunted house loses its power. With the right tools, you can banish these cybersecurity nightmares:

• Discover Hidden Apps: Use application discovery tools or cloud access security brokers (CASBs) to uncover nearly every app, even those lurking in the shadows.
• Map Identities: Implement identity governance platforms to track who has access to what, ensuring no orphaned accounts linger.
• Seal the Gaps: Enforce MFA, update integrations, and retire or patch legacy apps to lock out intruders.

With these floodlights blazing, the whispers fade, the ghosts vanish, and your haunted house transforms into a secure, well-lit fortress.

The Final Exit: Escaping the Haunted House

The scariest part of identity security isn’t the threats you see - it’s the ones you don’t. This Halloween, dare to listen to what your applications are whispering in the night. Shine a light on your systems, or someone else - like a hacker - might beat you to it. Ready to check your own haunted house?

Sleep tight, and maybe keep the lights on in your identity stack tonight.