For years, the cybersecurity community has been quick to rally around major outbreaks – worms, ransomware strains, zero-day exploits. Emergency patches are deployed. Threat advisories are issued. And global organizations spring into action.
But some…ailments…spread more quietly. They persist for years inside an organization before anyone notices. They don’t crash systems. They don’t lock up files. They don’t even raise alerts.
They just accumulate. And accumulate. And accumulate.
Passwords, API keys, tokens, config files, .env variables, hardcoded blobs in random GitLab repos – they’re everywhere.
You know this already. You’ve probably had a conversation about it. You may have even written the incident report.
Today, we gave it a name.
It may not be recognized by the World Health Organization, and we certainly are not the first to suggest that secrets sprawl is hazardous to your IT organization’s health, and the personal sanity of your developer, DevOps, and security teams.
We are, however, suggesting that it is more than a hygiene problem. Vaults, rotation schedules, and scanning tools are often prescribed as remedies – but these solutions rarely address the underlying disease. They treat the symptoms, sometimes effectively, but only by reinforcing the same brittle credentialing model that created the mess in the first place.
And yet, here we are. Still rotating, still scanning, still pushing secrets through pipelines and hoping nothing breaks (or leaks). No one is quite sure who owns the problem, and everyone suspects someone else should be cleaning it up.
So we built something to help teams diagnose and address it.
Inside AccessZero — our new premium, interactive, and immersive content hub dedicated to helping security and engineering teams understand and confront the non-human identity crisis — is Credentialitis.
Your guide through the Credentialitis experience is none other than Dr. Seymour Keys, who, coincidentally, has an uncannny ability to see, er, diagnose credential chaos.
A totally real human medical professional, he’s here to help you understand the symptoms, assess your exposure, and determine the best course of treatment.
Here’s what you’ll find inside the Credentialitis virtual activation:
- 🧬 WebMD-Style Page
A narrative overview — part satire, part educational deep dive — that explains the symptoms of Credentialitis using the language of both DevSecOps and health care. This page is your starting place. - 🩺 Diagnostic Quiz / Screening Tool
A short but revealing diagnostic that helps teams self-assess their current non-human identity posture. After you finish the short “exam,” you’ll be greeted with a custom risk score and an opportunity to take action. - 💊 Treatment & Recovery Plan
This is our downloadable prescriptive guide. It’s a vendor-neutral, empathetic walk-through of how security and engineering teams can start making meaningful progress toward workload IAM — whether they use Aembit or not. It’s loaded with takeaways teams can apply immediately.
More to come inside AccessZero. But for now, we recommend you get checked out by Dr. Keys. Credentialitis is more common than you think.
