Secrets sprawl: how we cleaned up 412 leaked tokens and stopped the latency bleed

When a CI pipeline failed at 02:13 AM on March 3, we discovered that 412 distinct API tokens had been leaked across 37 repositories, triggering a $1.2 M potential breach estimate within minutes. Per cisa.gov, the published data backs this up. Most teams think “install a Vault and we’re done”. In pra