When a developer laptop is compromised, the critical question is which credentials were exposed and need rotation. Most teams struggle to answer this because no pre-incident credential inventory exists, forcing them to either over-rotate (costly, causes outages) or under-rotate (leaves live credentials with attackers). EDR and forensics tools reveal what the attacker did but not what secrets were on the machine. A mature response requires a per-machine credential inventory built before incidents occur, tracking validity, file locations, access scope, and scan history. This inventory turns a days-long investigation into a prioritized, revocable list. Best practices include remediating credentials proactively, mapping credentials to owners via NHI Governance, categorizing findings by risk, and planting honeytokens for credentials that must remain in plaintext. GitGuardian Developer Endpoint Protection is presented as a tool that maintains this per-machine record and deploys AI hooks in coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot to intercept secrets before they reach disk.
