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Learn from experts, understand everything you need to know about compliance, and find answers to your pressing security questions.
Every secret scanner hands you a big number, and almost nobody can act on it. When we verified each finding against the service that issued it, a five-figure detection count became a three-figure inventory of credentials that actually work. This is what that collapse means for how you prioritize, what you suppress, and what you tell your board.
Every agent action is a credential action, and the industry is treating a governance shift as a provisioning task, exactly the way it did with service accounts.
The Korean GitHub token leaks and CISA's public-repo exposure were both filed as secrets leaks. What got out was not a file but a live identity. This piece argues that security leaders should treat API keys as identities and shift the defense from prevention rate to how fast you detect what has already leaked.
A leaked Slack incoming webhook is usually triaged as low severity: write-only, one channel, no data access. The moment an AI agent reads that channel and can act with tools, that write-only primitive becomes an indirect prompt injection path into the agent's privileges. Here is the full kill chain, the exact preconditions, and how to defend it.
Between 01:39 and 02:56 UTC on May 19, 2026, two tight publish bursts placed 639 malicious versions across 323 packages on npm. The single stolen `atool` session was only the entry point. The payload's worm logic harvested every additional maintainer npm token on the infected host and republished under those identities, which is why the wave spans 30 publisher handles. Cremit Argus surfaced 324 catches within thirty minutes via an OSV-MAL override path that intentionally bypasses LLM agreement for OSSF-flagged events. This article documents the attack structure, the detection methodology, and the false-positive trap that nearly slipped past during initial analysis.
Eight types of dangerous NHI credentials. One framework to find, classify, and eliminate them all. The complete NHI Kill Chain series summary with Cyber Kill Chain and MITRE ATT&CK mapping.
Full writeup of the AITU CTF Final (April 25-26, 2026), a HackCity-format competition. We walk through exploiting DMZ hosts via XXE, SSTI, and SQLi, pivoting into the DEV segment through AD lateral movement, escaping a privileged Docker container via cgroup abuse, and breaching a healthcare system through JWT JKU header injection.
On April 22, 2026, the official @bitwarden/cli@2026.4.0 npm package was malicious for ~90 minutes. A self-propagating worm exfiltrated AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, npm, SSH, and AI tooling credentials from CI runners. Vaults stayed safe. CI tokens did not. Timeline, NHI kill-chain mapping, and a 10-minute checklist to know whether you were affected.
Vercel confirmed an unauthorized-access incident on April 19, 2026 that started in a third-party AI tool, pivoted through Google Workspace, and reached environment variables in a subset of customer projects. The exposure surface is every env var that was not marked sensitive. Here is what is confirmed, what is noise, and what to rotate first.
A new CISO ordered a full NHI audit. The result: 3,400 active credentials, 60% with no identifiable owner. Can't revoke them, can't rotate them, can't assign responsibility.
A PostgreSQL master password drifted across seven platform types, from Secrets Manager to GitHub, Jenkins, Docker Hub, Jira, Confluence and Slack. Each security tool saw its own silo. None saw the full picture.
An organization's core credentials sat in public repositories for years. The security industry's answer: "Out of scope."
Secret scanning alert: Resolved. Credential status: Active. Deleting a secret from code is not the same as revoking it. Inside the Zombie Key kill chain.
Short monthly brief from the Cremit research team.