https://www.gitguardian.com/files/the-state-of-secrets-spraw...
In the 2025 report, we showed that nearly 70% of credentials confirmed as valid in 2022 were still valid as of January 2025, meaning they have not been rotated or otherwise remediated. When we retested the same dataset in January 2026, the validity rate remained over 64%. That persistence is not a rounding error. It is an operational signal that remediation, not detection, is still the industry’s limiting factor.
In the end there is always some long lived secret. What changes is just where and how it is stored, secured and used.
Obviously. The point here is to reduce the number of them