How to Protect Your Pipeline With DevSecOps: What Happens After You Find a Secret?

Secrets detection has become table stakes in modern DevSecOps. Most secrets detection tools offer basic exposed credential detection by scanning for leaked secrets in code, pipelines, or containers. But finding a secret is just the beginning. The real work starts the moment a credential leaks. So, what should your team actually do next?

Discovering an exposed credential in your codebase can feel like hitting a tripwire. You know there’s potential danger, but the immediate path forward isn’t always clear. An exposed secret might enable access to harmless test data or to customer data, cloud resources, or CI/CD infrastructure. That uncertainty can slow down response time, and attackers thrive in that gap. 

The problem is only getting worse. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that credential abuse accounts for 22% of incidents, an increase of 34% year over year. 

Without a clear and practiced process for responding to secrets exposures, even a small mistake can spiral into a full-blown incident. To stay ahead of threats, teams need a defined approach to quickly assess, contain, and resolve these issues before they escalate.

Why Secrets Still Slip Through

Secrets sprawl often outpaces manual controls and developer awareness, especially when it comes to managing application secrets across multiple repositories and environments. 

Overlooked test credentials in sample scripts and tokens buried in legacy repos are just a few examples of common errors that expose confidential details.

Even mature teams with well-configured CI/CD pipelines, strong code review processes, and strict access controls still find themselves dealing with leaked secrets. The complexity of modern development environments, with distributed teams, frequent releases, and third-party integrations, means credentials can be unintentionally exposed in countless ways. Common culprits include:

• Hardcoded API keys left in config files
• Tokens committed to version control by mistake
• Credentials included in log files
• Legacy secrets no one remembered were there

It only takes one slip to expose sensitive systems through mishandled secrets. Unfortunately, the average time to mitigate a secrets exposure incident is still too long. According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report, it takes an average of 292 days to identify and contain a breach involving compromised credentials. That timeline gives attackers ample opportunity to exploit exposed secrets. 

When your secrets detection tool flags a hardcoded secret, time is of the essence. The steps you take now can determine whether that secret becomes a security incident or just a well-handled warning. What follows is a proven, practical response playbook for handling exposed credentials from detection through resolution.

Step One: Confirm the Secret Is Real (and Still Active)

Your first move after a detection is validation. You’ll need to:

1. Determine if the secret is valid: Does it still provide access?
2. Check if its access matters: Is access provided to sensitive information, or only test/dummy data?
3. Assess the blast radius: What systems or data could this secret access? Is it scoped to a single user, or does it grant broad permissions?

This triage helps you prioritize next steps based on the severity of the exposure. If the secret is valid and in use, especially if it grants access to production systems or sensitive data, you’re officially in incident response territory. That means it’s time to shift gears from analysis to containment and remediation, with all the urgency and coordination that implies.

Step Two: Notify the Right People Fast

Secrets affect both dev and ops. When a leak is discovered, your communication must be just as responsive as your scan engine.

• Alert the owning team: This could be the developer who introduced the secret, the app owner, or the platform engineer managing the affected system.
• Involve security leadership: If the secret provides access to sensitive environments, loop in your head of AppSec.
• Coordinate with the compliance team: In regulated industries, certain types of exposure may mandate reporting protocols.

Speed is crucial to minimize the impact of a secrets leak. Ensuring everyone who needs to know is alerted as soon as the exposure is discovered keeps surprises to a minimum and helps all stakeholders address their part of the response effectively.

Step Three: Rotate and Revoke Immediately

Once you’ve confirmed a secret is valid, don’t wait. Rotate it as quickly as possible:

• Revoke the exposed credential internally or via your cloud or infrastructure provider.
• Generate a new one and store it securely in your vault.
• Update all code and configurations to use the new secret.

Most teams use secret managers or secret vaults like AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, or Azure Key Vault for this process. But a surprising number of credentials still end up hardcoded or managed manually, which slows rotation.

By integrating your secrets manager with CI/CD pipelines, you can automatically rotate and inject fresh credentials into deployments without manual intervention. This reduces human error, accelerates response time, and ensures that secrets detection is consistently managed across environments.

Step Four: Prevent the Next Exposure

Every secret incident is a learning opportunity. After containment, take time to:

• Review how the secret was introduced and why it wasn’t caught earlier.
• Update developer education and tooling to prevent similar issues.
• Add or refine detection policies to catch secrets earlier in the SDLC.
• Audit other repos and environments to proactively find similar issues.

Tools that embed into your pipeline, like Checkmarx One, let you shift secrets detection left so developers can fix problems before they land in main. 

Real-World Example: Leaked AWS Keys in a Popular SDK

In late 2023, an open-source JavaScript SDK accidentally published AWS credentials to GitHub. The repo had thousands of stars and was widely used. Within hours, security researchers noticed the leak and confirmed the keys were active.

The exposed credentials included AWS Access Key IDs and Secret Access Keys with IAM roles that allowed full EC2 access. Attackers quickly took advantage of the permissive policy settings to launch cryptocurrency mining operations, creating dozens of compute instances across multiple regions. Since the keys weren’t scoped with granular permissions or usage limits, the damage escalated quickly and was difficult to contain.

Unfortunately, the credentials weren’t rotated immediately. Within minutes, attackers used them to spin up crypto mining instances, leading to a hefty AWS bill for the developer and an incident response nightmare for downstream consumers.

This example highlights the importance of:

• Automated detection with real-time alerts
• Timely validation and rotation
• Clear ownership of secrets and repos

The key to prevention? Integrated scanning and vaulting can substantially reduce the blast radius in situations like these.

Making Secrets Remediation a DevSecOps Practice

A strong exposed credential detection capability is critical, but it’s what happens next that defines your security posture. The real value comes when you can act quickly and decisively. This means:

• Automating detection across all pipelines and environments
• Integrating secrets remediation into your existing workflows
• Building collaboration between AppSec and developers
• Closing the loop with education and continuous improvement

Finding an exposed credential doesn’t have to spell disaster. But it does require a well-defined and fast-moving process. With smart, automated detection, communication, and remediation steps in place, your team can turn what would have been a breach into just another (well-handled) security event.