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Secrets Management Horror Stories from the Field: Four Security Pitfalls to Avoid

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  • Calendar icon November 18 Calendar icon Americas: 2PM ET | EMEA: 3PM CET | APAC: 11AM SGT

The recent  Shai-Hulud npm worm shows how fast an initial compromise can spread when secrets are poorly managed. After gaining access, the malware used tools like TruffleHog to harvest hardcoded tokens and credentials, then escalated laterally through packages, pipelines, and cloud accounts. It’s a vivid reminder that without strong policies, decentralized secrets management fuels the blast radius of attacks.

From hands-on work with customers, our security services team has identified four practices that put organizations most at risk:

      • Shared access across teams – one secret or account reused across multiple workloads.
      • Poor Kubernetes namespace definitions – mixing dev, test, and prod without clear boundaries.
      • Pipelines under a single identity – Jenkins or Ansible jobs running with unrestricted privileges.
      • One cloud account or platform for everything – concentrating risk into a single identity plane.

For each, our security services team will share real-world stories of how attackers exploit these practices, and the  field-tested solutions that leading organizations are adopting to fix them. You’ll learn why the true risk isn’t just the secret, but the identity behind it—and how centralizing secrets management reduces blast radius, improves visibility, and scales securely without disrupting developers.

You will learn:

          • How poor secrets practices enable lateral movement and breach escalation.
          • Four real-world pitfalls we see in customer environments—and proven ways to fix them.
          • How centralization strengthens governance, audit readiness, and resilience.
Presenters:
John Walsh

John Walsh

Senior Product Marketing Manager, CyberArk
Nathan Whipple

Nathan Whipple

Senior Manager, Security Services, DevSecOps, CyberArk
Benjamin Dorn

Benjamin Dorn

Senior Security Consultant, DevSecOps, CyberArk

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About CyberArk
CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR) is the global leader in identity security, trusted by organizations around the world to secure human and machine identities in the modern enterprise. CyberArk’s AI-powered Identity Security Platform applies intelligent privilege controls to every identity with continuous threat prevention, detection and response across the identity lifecycle. With CyberArk, organizations can reduce operational and security risks by enabling zero trust and least privilege with complete visibility, empowering all users and identities, including workforce, IT, developers and machines, to securely access any resource, located anywhere, from everywhere. Learn more at cyberark.com.