The Hacker News piece correctly flags cached AWS keys and over-privileged roles as latent attack paths, yet understates how these exposures now form persistent living-off-the-land corridors across hybrid estates. A single Windows-cached credential no longer represents an isolated lapse; it seeds an identity that traverses Active Directory groups, lingering SSO assignments, and AI-agent service accounts with cross-boundary permissions. Palo Alto’s 2025 incident response data, cited in the original, showed identity weaknesses in nearly 90 percent of cases, but the report misses the compounding effect when machine identities inherit those same rights. SpyCloud’s 2026 findings on non-human credential theft further reveal that one-third of recovered tokens now tie directly to AI tooling, a vector absent from legacy IGA and PAM designs built for static user lifecycles. The real gap lies in the absence of path-mapping: organizations still audit permissions in silos while attackers chain a retail-endpoint key to domain admin, then to production cloud roles without triggering session-monitoring tools. This shift mirrors broader credential-abuse trends documented in Verizon’s DBIR 2025, where stolen or reused identities supplanted malware as the dominant initial vector. Until security programs treat identity graphs as attack surfaces rather than perimeter gates, each new MCP server or AI workload simply lengthens the highway.