Breaking the attack chain created by exposed cloud secrets 

This report explains how exposed secrets — in this case a readable Terraform state file in an overly permissive S3 bucket — can create a chain of compromise across cloud providers: S3 → GitHub → Azure Key Vault → another AWS account, ultimately yielding administrative access. It emphasizes that secrets often appear in storage, code, logs, and environment variables, and recommends mitigations such as short‑lived identities, secret managers, least privilege, runtime retrieval, continuous scanning and automated rotation to contain and reduce the impact of such exposures.