Dev environments are not secure by default

Development environments have become the forgotten frontier of organizational security. While production systems receive rigorous scrutiny and robust security controls, development and staging environments often operate under the dangerous assumption that "it's just dev" means "it's safe." This mindset has created a critical vulnerability in modern software development pipelines, where secrets management practices are frequently neglected, leaving organizations open and exposed to severe security incidents that can filter into production systems and cause operational disruptions.

The hidden danger in your development pipeline

The statistics paint a troubling picture of how organizations handle sensitive data in development environments. The statistics paint a troubling picture... Research from GitGuardian's 2025 State of Secrets Sprawl reveals that private repositories are nine times more likely to contain exposed secrets than public ones. In 2024 alone, over 23 million hardcoded secrets were detected in public commits. This practice turns every developer workstation, every CI/CD pipeline, and every version control system into a potential attack vector. When secrets are hardcoded or stored in plain-text configuration files, they become accessible to anyone with repository access, and, worse, they often persist in commit history long after being rotated in production.

The problem compounds when you consider that 62% of companies have serious vulnerabilities with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score greater than 7 in their code repositories. These vulnerabilities, combined with exposed secrets, create perfect conditions for attackers to gain initial access and move laterally through an organization's infrastructure.

Why development environments become attack launchpads

Development environments are desirable targets because they often mirror production architecture while maintaining weaker security controls. Organizations typically implement multi-factor authentication, encryption, and monitoring in production, yet 61% maintain a root user or account owner without multi-factor authentication in their cloud environments. This disparity creates an asymmetric risk, allowing attackers to use compromised development credentials to understand the production architecture, test exploits, and gather intelligence before launching attacks on more protected systems.

The attack surface is substantial. Research indicates that 84% of organizations have at least one public-facing neglected asset, and 81% of these assets commonly have open ports that are often exploited. Development servers, staging databases, and test APIs frequently fall into this category, running outdated software without regular patching or monitoring. When these systems contain production-adjacent data or credentials with elevated privileges, a single compromised development environment can serve as a stepping stone to critical systems.

The operational impact of secrets exposure

When secrets leak from development environments, the operational consequences extend beyond the immediate breach. Compromised credentials from development systems frequently enable these attacks. The cascading effects include:

Lateral movement risks

Attackers who obtain development credentials often find that these credentials work across multiple environments due to poor secrets rotation practices. If a developer's database credentials work in both staging and production, or if API keys aren't properly scoped by environment, a single compromised secret can grant access to critical production data.

Supply chain vulnerabilities

Modern development relies heavily on third-party dependencies and libraries. Currently, 15% of services are vulnerable to known-exploited vulnerabilities, with Java applications particularly at risk. When development environments lack proper secrets management, attackers can inject malicious code or dependencies that propagate through the build pipeline into production releases.

Extended breach windows

The average time to detect a cloud breach is 277 days, and breaches involving multiple environments take an average of 283 days to identify and contain. Development environment compromises often go unnoticed even longer because these systems receive less monitoring attention than production infrastructure. This extended dwell time allows attackers to thoroughly map your infrastructure and identify the most valuable targets.

Compliance and regulatory impact

When development environments contain production data or production-like data without proper controls, organizations violate numerous compliance requirements. Less than 10% of enterprises have encrypted 80% or more of their data in the cloud, and this gap is particularly pronounced in non-production environments.

Common attack vectors through development systems

Understanding how attackers exploit poorly secured development environments helps illuminate the scope of the risk. The most prevalent attack patterns include:

Repository scanning

Attackers continuously scan public and exposed private repositories for committed secrets. With 88% of organizations receiving untargeted malicious HTTP requests, automated scanning tools sweep code repositories looking for API keys, database credentials, and authentication tokens that developers accidentally commit.

Misconfigured cloud storage

Development teams frequently spin up cloud storage buckets for testing and then forget about them. Statistics show that 21% of organizations have at least one public-facing cloud storage bucket containing sensitive data. These misconfigurations often stem from developers copying production infrastructure templates without implementing the same security controls in place.

Abandoned test infrastructure

Development and testing generate substantial infrastructure sprawl. Servers created for temporary testing, proof-of-concept databases, and experimental APIs often remain online long after their purpose has been served. These forgotten assets create shadow IT that bypasses security reviews and standard hardening practices.

Building secure development practices

Organizations must recognize that development environment security isn't optional or secondary to production security. Several critical practices can dramatically reduce risk:

Implement secrets management solutions across all environments, not just production.

Tools like Doppler allow you to enforce the same level of rigor in development as in production. Instead of relying on static ⁠.env files, teams should transition to dynamic secrets. These allow you to generate time-bound, ephemeral credentials that expire automatically, ensuring that even if a secret is leaked, it becomes useless to an attacker within minutes.

Adopt the principle of least privilege throughout the development lifecycle.

Development credentials should have minimal necessary permissions and should never include production access. This extends to your code governance as well; enforcing best practices https://www.doppler.com/blog/our-source-control-best-practices) such as branch protection rules, signed commits, and separation of duties. Prevent accidental exposure and limits the blast radius if a developer account is compromised.

Establish robust monitoring and alerting for development infrastructure.

The fact that 32% of cloud assets sit unmonitored reflects a broader tendency to deprioritize non-production visibility. Security information and event management (SIEM) systems should include development environment logs to detect anomalies, such as a "dev" user attempting to access production buckets or unusual API traffic patterns originating from test servers.

The path forward

The notion that development environments are inherently safe because they're "not production" has become a dangerous liability. With 81% of organizations experiencing at least one cloud security incident in the past year and attack frequencies on the rise, the security of development infrastructure has a direct impact on organizational resilience. Modern attackers understand that the path of least resistance often runs through development systems, and they systematically exploit this weakness.

Securing development environments requires a fundamental shift in how organizations approach security. Rather than treating security as a production-only concern, teams must embed security controls throughout the software development lifecycle. This means treating secrets as sensitive in every environment, maintaining the same vigilance for development infrastructure as for production systems, and recognizing that in an interconnected infrastructure, every environment is a potential entry point. The organizations that thrive will be those that treat security as foundational, building it into every layer of their technical stack rather than accepting insecurity as a default.

If your organization is looking to secure its development flows from development all the way to production, Doppler can help you with multi-environment per project-based design. You can get yourself quickly set up by creating a free Doppler account to get started.