As organizations navigate an increasingly stricter, faster, and dynamic world of cybersecurity, secrets management continues to become an increasing burden. GitGuardian, the worldwide leader in secrets security, is convinced that detecting is not enough to solve these problems. Organizations today are feeling the financial and reputational impact of security breaches. As we saw with the recent s1ngularity attack, this is a serious problem for many organizations, resulting in the theft of 2,349 credentials and 82,901 secrets being exposed. Breaches within the United States have reached an all-time high expense of $10.22 million USD. Organizations need to reimagine their incident remediation playbooks to better combat this increasingly pervasive threat.
The cost of manual secrets management is mind-boggling, and companies are said to be wasting almost $1.4 million annually. Adding $936,000 for developer time spent on credential rotation and investigating exposures brings the cost to $14.8 million. Additionally, security analysts are stuck sorting through a large volume of false positives, costing over $500,000 per year. This expensive cycle highlights the imperative for a better way to manage secrets.
The Cost of Secrets Management
Many organizations fail to account for the enormous financial cost of keeping secrets. GitGuardian’s recent analysis underscores how these manual processes rob organizations of not only their financial resources but the valuable time of developers. When developers are forced to allocate hours to search through codebases for potential leaks or to rotate credentials, productivity suffers. This wasteful, unproductive use of time creates a huge opportunity cost, slowing creativity, progress on projects and delivery of projects to their communities.
Enterprise companies usually have thousands of orphaned secrets spread out across public and private environments. These secrets live in code repositories, CI/CD pipelines and collaboration tools such as Slack and Jira. This fragmentation makes it far more difficult to keep all of these pieces remediated and secure, raising the risk of a security event. As layoffs result in increased mean-time-to-remediate incidents, organizations leave themselves more vulnerable during that ever-important 292-day average containment window.
We argue that investing in fast, efficient remediation paths can pay substantial dividends for scrappy teams building things in high-pressure environments. Organizations can reduce these risks by honing in on proactive detection. This proactive strategy not only wards off incidents, it stops small nuisance incidents from developing into expensive breaches.
Learning from Recent Attacks
The extent of secrets security issues was recently brought to light by the s1ngularity attack. The massive count of compromised credentials illustrates a growing weakness. Even a single hardcoded in an API key can enable attackers to conduct lateral movement within an affected organization’s network, laying the groundwork for more serious dangers such as supply chain attacks and ransomware execution. This latest incident should be a wake-up call for all organizations to review their secrets management policy and practices.
The growing complexity of IT environments only adds to these challenges. Security teams are already stretched thin. They don’t have the time or manpower to physically comb through thousands of records and dig up useful background information on every leak. Because of this, organizations have a hard time containing incidents when they do occur, leaving vulnerabilities active far longer than needed. By implementing solutions that combine preventive scanning during code commits with reactive scanning for existing leaks, organizations can catch issues before they reach the troubling average containment window.
The Power of Proactive Detection
GitGuardian’s unique approach aims to better protect secrets security by doing it the right way with a proactive approach. Their platform combines preventive scanning where developers commit code as well as reactive scanning to identify existing vulnerabilities. This combined strategy enables agencies to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities earlier in the development lifecycle. Additionally, by taking these measures, they can stop these risks from becoming serious breaches.
By freeing developers from these processes of secrets management through automation, GitGuardian allows their teams to focus their work where it can do the most good. This lowers the organizational burden created from false-positive alerts, while improving long-term security team efficiency. Teams can finally avoid needing to spend countless manual hours on investigations. They’re able to spend their time more efficiently, leading to faster remediation and reduced downtime.