By obtaining a leaked secret, an attacker can gain control over your organization’s Linode infrastructure. They can modify DNS settings, redirect traffic, or launch malicious instances that can be used for various nefarious activities, including launching DDoS attacks, hosting phishing websites, or distributing malware. Malicious instances may also be used for resource-intensive tasks such as cryptocurrency mining.

This can result in legal liability, but also increased costs, degraded performance, and potential service disruptions.

Furthermore, corporate Linode infrastructures are often connected to other services and to the internal networks of the organization. Because of this, cloud infrastructure is often used by attackers as a gateway to other assets. Attackers can leverage this gateway to gain access to more services, to compromise more business-critical data and to cause more damage to the overall infrastructure.

If the affected service is used to store or process personally identifiable information or other sensitive data, attackers knowing an authentication secret could be able to access it. Depending on the type of data that is compromised, it could lead to privacy violations, identity theft, financial loss, or other negative outcomes.

In most cases, a company suffering a sensitive data compromise will face a reputational loss when the security issue is publicly disclosed.

Applications may rely on data that cannot be distributed with the application code. This may be due to the size of the data, or because the data is regularly updated. This data is downloaded by the application as it is needed.

If an attacker can gain access to an authentication secret, they may be able to alter or delete this application data. This may cause parts of the application to misbehave or stop working. Maliciously altered data could also contain undesirable content which results in reputational damage.