What is Data Breach?
A data breach is a security incident in which sensitive, protected, or confidential data is accessed, disclosed, or stolen by an unauthorized party, whether through hacking, insider threat, misconfiguration, or accidental exposure.
Data breaches are among the most damaging security events an organization can face. They can expose customer personal information, financial records, intellectual property, and access credentials. The consequences include regulatory fines, legal liability, reputational damage, and direct financial loss from fraud or service disruption.
Credential exposure is both a common cause and a common consequence of data breaches. Leaked passwords and API keys from one breach are used to gain access to other systems (credential stuffing), creating a chain reaction of compromises. Industry reports consistently rank stolen credentials as the number one initial attack vector in confirmed breaches.
Reducing the blast radius of a potential breach is a core security principle. This means minimizing the amount of sensitive data stored in any single location, encrypting data so that a storage breach does not immediately expose readable information, and ensuring credentials are rotated regularly so that stolen credentials have a limited useful lifetime.
How Vaulted uses Data Breach
Vaulted is designed to minimize breach impact at multiple levels. Secrets are stored as ciphertext that cannot be decrypted without keys the server never possesses. Secrets are ephemeral — they self-destruct after a limited number of views or a set time period, so the window of exposure is minimal. Even a full compromise of Vaulted's Redis database would yield only encrypted blobs and metadata, with no path to recovering the original secrets.