Modern automation frameworks have come a long way—Playwright, Cypress, RestAssured, Cucumber, and Selenium enable teams to run sophisticated end-to-end validations across browsers and services. But under all that progress lies a risk that’s still alarmingly common: secrets hardcoded into test code or environment files.
These aren’t just theoretical risks. In one large enterprise, a regression test suite for an internal app had a credentials file committed in plain text six months prior. The automation “just worked,” but the secrets were not only stored in .env files—they were also printed to Jenkins console logs, referenced in Postman collections, and distributed across multiple forks. No one noticed until a security audit flagged it.
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