The risk in one paragraph Every time your team deploys software to AWS, a pipeline authenticates with credentials that can modify production infrastructure. In most organizations, these credentials have far more access than needed, are shared across environments, and are never reviewed. If an attacker compromises one pipeline, they own the account. This is not theoretical. In March 2026, attackers compromised the Trivy security scanner's GitHub Action by force-pushing malicious code to 75 version tags. Every organization running Trivy in their pipeline had secrets stolen. The attack cascaded into further compromises across PyPI and downstream projects. In April 2026, an AI-powered campaign opened 475 malicious pull requests in 26 hours, exfiltrating credentials from hundreds of organizations over six weeks before detection. Why this keeps happening Three structural problems: 1. Long-lived credentials. Most pipelines authenticate with static access keys stored as CI/CD variables.…