Do you think your secrets are protected? - Think again

Itzik Alvas, Co-founder & CEO, Entro
March 21, 2023

As we all know, today, everything is in the cloud.

Every organization’s application must use cloud services such as databases, storage accounts, and more. An application requires a key or a password to authenticate to these cloud services. These keys are commonly referred to as secrets and can take the form of API keys, connection strings, tokens, and many other additional types of authentication credentials.

Unfortunately, secrets are also a massive security threat to organizations.

 

Why is securing secrets a tricky and challenging organizational task?

One of the main reasons secrets are exposed is the lack of proper management and protection. Why is that? Because in many cases, R&D teams are the ones responsible for creating and storing secrets, but they are not the ones who are responsible for securing them.

 In a nutshell, there is zero oversight. This leads to a situation where secrets are scattered throughout the organization, saved in code, CI/CD pipelines, Slack, and Wikipedia, as well as various secret stores and vaults.

 

Vaults are not the solution

While vaults have traditionally been seen as secure solutions for storing secrets, it is clear that they are only storage solutions for R&D.

Vaults do not provide proper visibility, management, or secrets protection. In addition, if you happen to come across an exposed secret, In most cases, you know nothing about it. You can’t determine when it was created, who is using the specific key, which cloud service it originated from, what cloud service it can access, and many other vital details needed to understand the secret risk severity and how to protect your secrets.

 

Without proper visibility and secrets security tooling, CISOs and their security teams cannot manage and protect secrets adequately. Secret misuse and abuse can go undetected, and security compliance cannot be achieved, exposing an organization to highly destructive secret-based attacks.

 

Secret targeted attacks account for one out of the top three attack vectors and are the most devastating to an organization, leading to data breaches and reputational damage.

Several types of secret-based attacks include credential stuffing, account takeover, and data breaches.

Once attackers have access to an organization’s secrets, they can use them to create new ones and continue breaching the organization in loops, making it almost impossible to mitigate these attacks without a proper secret protection solution.

 

 

Needless to say that protecting your organization’s secrets is critical for application security. Proper secret management and protection involve identifying, discovering, classifying with context, and securing secrets across the organization’s infrastructure, applications, and cloud services. It also requires implementing access controls, monitoring, and auditing secret usage to detect unauthorized activities and enforce security compliance.

 

Security teams must have complete control of their organizations’ secrets management. It is essential for security teams to manage and protect the organization’s secrets to ensure business security and continuity.

It is their responsibility.

In simple words, it is their job. Secrets must be managed and protected across an organization’s infrastructure, applications, and cloud services. With the right tools in place, It is possible to mitigate the risk of secret-based attacks and ensure the organization’s security compliance.

 

To learn more about secret security, get in touch today.

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