If you think that using a secret management tool is the final step in cyber hygiene, think again.
The recent Vault Fault disclosures proved that even top-tier secrets management tools can crumble under the right pressure. These weren’t small bugs.
They were critical CVEs, like CVE-2025-6000 (Remote Code Execution in HashiCorp Vault) and CVE-2025-49827 (IAM bypass in CyberArk)—both with 9.1 CVSS scores. These flaws let attackers impersonate policies, bypass MFA, and even hold your entire vault for ransom.
Secrets management systems, commonly called vaults, are high-value targets because they safeguard the most sensitive assets: API tokens, SSH keys, database passwords, and TLS certificates. Yet most enterprises don’t secure them as rigorously as the rest of their infrastructure.
In some cases, organizations even operate multiple vaults, often with inconsistent controls. Secrets end up scattered across environments, while vaults themselves often lack visibility into how secrets are used once retrieved, creating dangerous blind spots. As Cyata CEO Shahar Tal warned, “vaults may be critical infrastructure, but they are far from invulnerable. An attacker can ransomware your entire vault and take every secret hostage.”
That’s why vendor patches aren’t enough. The burden of vault security must shift left into operational reality. Regular red-team-style penetration testing is now essential to keeping your organizations secrets secret.
Here are five penetration testing activities, recommended by experienced offensive security professionals, that can reveal hidden weaknesses in your vault setup.
Pentest the Audit Logs
Audit logs provide visibility into secret usage patterns. They help security teams to identify anomalies like unusual access times, geographic locations, or access patterns that might indicate compromised credentials.
So when an attacker gets into them, or worse, manipulates them, it’s like cutting the feed to your surveillance system. Everything that happens to your secrets management tool will be untraceable.
Sumedh Barde, CPO at Simbian puts it “If your logs are not stored as securely as the vault; they’re a weak link.”
If that’s the case, Barde advises that you start by auditing the logs themselves. Ask: Where are they stored? Are they encrypted? Immutable? Digitally signed?
Then test if key events are logged, such as secret rotation, emergency access, and policy changes. If only requests or only responses are captured, attackers can make changes without leaving a full trace.
Push the system further by injecting fake events, modifying timestamps, or flooding logs with noise. These tests show whether attackers could erase, alter, or bury their actions. Also include edge cases like failed operations or admin tasks during maintenance, as they often create blind spots.
Next, simulate real attacks under these conditions. Hide malicious actions in normal traffic, operate just below alert thresholds, and exploit timing gaps between log components. The objective is to see if you can maintain undetected access by avoiding logs entirely or by blending in as routine admin activity. If both automated tools and human reviews miss it, the logging setup has failed.
Pentest Secret Zero
Every vault starts with one master credential; Secret Zero. And it’s a paradox: it must be secure enough to guard the vault but available enough to bootstrap access. Which is why it’s often the weakest link.
Secret Zero can’t be stored in the vault. It’s the thing that unlocks the vault in the first place. In theory, it should be tightly secured, ideally tied to real user identity (like via AWS IAM, OIDC, etc.).
But in reality, developers often store it where it doesn’t belong like in config files, environment variables, or even hardcoded into scripts. Sometimes, it even leaks into logs or gets checked into GitHub by mistake.
Many companies run separate secrets management platforms for dev, staging, and production, each with its own Secret Zero. Yes that’s good segmentation, but it also multiplies your risk. Some teams overlook Secret Zero to the point of breaking automation. Others under-secure it for convenience.
As Sumedh Barde explains, a common red team approach is “to scan codebases and logs for strings that resemble credentials or keys, or to phish a user into exposing their environment variables”. Also, map how Secret Zero is distributed. Then try to retrieve it through indirect paths: CI/CD pipelines, local dev environments, or cloud metadata services.
Pentest the Apps That Talk to the Vault
Sometimes attackers avoid targeting the secrets management platform directly. Instead, they focus on applications already connected to it, such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps.
Take Jenkins as an example. It integrates with secrets management by design, pulling credentials to inject into builds. When this setup is misconfigured, it becomes a potential entry point for attackers. To simulate this, you can look for leaked tokens, weak permissions, or outdated plugins. If you find any, impersonate Jenkins and request secrets just like a normal build job would.
You should also attempt to access Jenkins’ script console. It runs with full server privileges, which means once you gain control, you not only own Jenkins but also the underlying host.
To pentest effectively, map out every integration point. Track which tokens are being used, what permissions they grant, and which secrets they expose. Then test the entire chain under realistic attack conditions. Apply the same process to all applications integrated with your secrets management tool.
Pentest the Host Environment
Every secrets management tool runs on a host environment , which could be a cloud server, a container, or a physical machine. If the host is compromised, the tool will also fall.
To test the host environment, use the Assumed Breach model which assumes that an attacker already has a cloud credential, like an over-permissioned IAM role or a forgotten Lambda function. From there, check what roles, policies, and trust links exist, and see how far that access can go. The goal is to impersonate an identity that can reach the secrets management tool and then pivot deeper.
Tools like ScoutSuite and Prowler can help uncover misconfigurations, exposed resources, and weak security practices in cloud environments. They highlight issues such as poorly configured Vault deployments, hardcoded passwords or API keys, and internal systems exposed to the internet.
If the secrets management tool runs in containers managed by Kubernetes, a stolen kubeconfig file can give an attacker control of the cluster. With it, they can read secrets stored in containers or configuration files. To test this, validate the kubeconfig by checking cluster connectivity and enumerating RBAC permissions. Then map the cluster by listing namespaces, pods, services, and deployments to locate where secrets are managed.
From there, extract secrets through Kubernetes objects like Secrets, ConfigMaps, environment variables, or mounted volumes. Use kubectl to pull secret data stored in etcd. With credentials such as database passwords, API keys, and tokens, you can attempt lateral movement beyond the cluster. Finally, test persistence by deploying malicious pods, creating backdoor service accounts, or modifying workloads through deployment manifests.
Run a Quarterly Credential Hunt
Credential hunting may not sound exciting, but it’s one of the most effective ways to protect your secrets. As Joey Melo, AI Red Teaming Specialist at Pangea, explains: “Most vault breaches don’t start by hacking the vault directly. They start when someone accidentally leaves a password lying around… and from there, attackers chain it with other weak spots.”
The point is simple: attackers don’t always need advanced exploits when forgotten credentials are already within reach. A stale password in Slack can lead to an old secret in GitHub, which might connect to an API key hardcoded in a config file. Even small oversights, like notes in Active Directory or internal wiki pages, can give them exactly what they need.
That’s why credential hunts should be a regular part of your security process. Running them once a year during a pentest isn’t enough. By making it a quarterly routine, you can find and fix mistakes before attackers do.
A proper sweep doesn’t stop at internal systems either. Breach detection tools and dark web monitors can reveal if your credentials are already exposed. Platforms like Dropbox, Jira, and Notion are also worth checking, since they often hold forgotten files and links that still contain sensitive data.
According to Melo, three months is the right rhythm. It gives enough time for new secrets to appear, but not enough for attackers to fully exploit them.
Final Thoughts
A secrets management tool is only as secure as the environment around it. Even if the tool itself is configured, patched, and monitored correctly, it can still fail because of weak credential hygiene, neglected integrations, or an exposed host.
That’s why you need a consistent baseline to work from. Audit your logs to make sure they capture the right events. Trace the applications that connect to the tool and check how they use secrets. Test the hosts that run it to confirm they’re secure. Sweep your environment for forgotten secrets. Hunt for leaked credentials across internal and external systems.
And don’t stop after one round. Repeat the process every quarter. Attackers never stop looking for gaps, so your defenses shouldn’t stop evolving either.
