Even mature environments misjudge the scope of their privileged access exposure. This article unpacks how real-world privilege creep unfolds, from nested AD groups to unmanaged service accounts, forgotten appliance credentials, and newly created local admins. PAM tooling helps, but it is often blind to the accounts that matter most. If your visibility stops at Domain Admins or naming convention–based groups like CyberArk-Admins-VMWare or Delinea-SA-Storage, you are not seeing the breach path.