Why do infostealers become more damaging when organisations keep secrets and session tokens in multiple places?

Infostealers are more damaging when secrets are duplicated because one compromise can expose several recovery paths at once. If passwords, cookies, API keys, and tokens are spread across browsers, files, chats, and ticketing systems, attackers can pivot quickly and operate longer without detection. Centralized handling, tight rotation, and clear ownership reduce that blast radius.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Infostealers become far more dangerous when secrets and session tokens are scattered because the attacker does not need to “find the one vault.” They only need one endpoint, browser profile, ticket, chat export, or source-control artifact that still contains a usable credential. NHIMG’s Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge highlights how duplication turns a single compromise into multiple entry points, while the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 frames exposed secrets and weak lifecycle controls as a recurring identity failure, not just a hygiene issue.

The operational problem is blast radius. A stolen browser cookie may unlock SaaS admin consoles, while an API key in a wiki can still be valid long after the original incident is detected. Duplicated secrets also defeat simple response playbooks because teams often revoke one copy and miss the others. NHIMG research on the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity found that 62% of all secrets are duplicated and stored in multiple locations. In practice, many security teams encounter the real scope of exposure only after an attacker has already chained those copies together.

How It Works in Practice

Infostealers are designed to harvest whatever is immediately useful: passwords from browsers, session cookies from local storage, API keys from config files, and tokens from collaboration tools or code repositories. Once a single secret is recovered, the attacker can often skip password resets entirely and reuse the stolen session to impersonate a legitimate user. That is why duplicated secrets are more damaging than a single exposed credential. Every extra copy creates another chance for persistence, lateral movement, or delayed detection.

Security teams usually reduce this risk by collapsing secrets into one governed system and treating session tokens as short-lived, high-value credentials. Current guidance suggests three practical moves:

• Use one authoritative secret store and remove ad hoc copies from chats, tickets, and documents.
• Rotate and revoke credentials automatically when a leak is detected, not after manual review.
• Prefer short-lived session tokens over long-lived static credentials, with ownership tied to a named service or workload.

For background on how duplicated storage expands risk, NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Static vs Dynamic Secrets is useful alongside the NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls on access control, auditing, and credential management. The practical lesson is that detection alone is not enough if every duplicate remains valid after the first compromise. These controls tend to break down when engineering teams hardcode secrets into build systems or share session tokens through support workflows because revocation coverage becomes incomplete.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter secret handling often increases operational friction, requiring organisations to balance containment against developer speed and helpdesk responsiveness. That tradeoff matters because some environments still rely on shared service accounts, legacy browsers, or vendor portals that do not support clean token lifecycle control. Best practice is evolving, but there is no universal standard for every edge case yet.

One common exception is incident response: teams may temporarily duplicate a credential during containment, for example when preserving access while migrating to a fresh token. Another is third-party integration, where an external platform may cache tokens in places the owning team cannot directly govern. In both cases, the key question is not whether duplication exists, but whether each copy has a clear owner, a defined TTL, and a reliable revocation path.

NHIMG’s The State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 shows why this matters: large shares of incidents originate outside code repositories, where teams are least likely to monitor for token reuse. That pattern aligns with the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 focus on lifecycle and exposure risk. In practice, the hardest cases are legacy environments where secrets are embedded in scripts, inboxes, and ticket trails, because the organisation cannot revoke what it cannot inventory.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should organisations respond when an IDE extension attack targets cloud tokens, CI/CD secrets, and AI coding assistant credentials at the same time?
• Why do identity and session threats become harder to contain when security teams rely only on perimeter controls?
• Why do compromised identities and tokens create more breach risk than traditional perimeter failures in cloud-first organisations?
• What is secrets exposure in NHI security?