Introducing Heeler Secrets: Real-Time Detection and Validation for Exposed Credentials

Secrets exposure remains one of the fastest paths from a minor mistake to a major security incident. Hard-coded API keys, cloud credentials, and tokens still find their way into repositories and commit histories; often long after teams think they’ve been removed.

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Heeler Secrets, a new capability designed to help security teams identify, validate, and remediate exposed credentials in real time.

Unlike traditional secret scanners that rely heavily on regex and static pattern matching, Heeler Secrets combines language-aware detection, high-performance scanning, and active validation to surface only the secrets that actually represent exploitable risk.

Why We Built Heeler Secrets

Most secret scanning tools generate large volumes of findings, many of which are stale, invalid, or never exploitable. Security teams end up spending significant time triaging noise, while real risk is buried or missed entirely.

Heeler Secrets takes a different approach, one that immediately identifies validated secrets.

In every customer environment we have deployed to, this approach has identified dozens of validated secrets, many tied to critical systems, that had previously been lost in the noise of traditional secret scanning tools.

Heeler achieves this by leveraging 700+ detection and validation rules across hundreds of providers, ensuring high signal, low noise, and immediate focus on real, exploitable risk.

What Heeler Secrets Scans (History Included)

Heeler continuously analyzes multiple sources across your software development lifecycle to uncover exposed credentials, including:

• Code repositories
• Git commit histories

A common blind spot is active secrets lingering in code history. A developer removes the secret from the codebase but never invalidates it. Traditional scanners see nothing and move on, while attackers deliberately mine commit history to recover and exploit those credentials.

Heeler closes this gap by scanning commit histories to surface active secrets and hidden risk that would otherwise remain invisible.

Supported Source Control Providers

Heeler Secrets supports secret detection across the most common enterprise SCM platforms:

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Azure DevOps
• Bitbucket

This ensures consistent coverage across modern development environments.

Language-Aware Secret Detection (Beyond Regex)

Heeler supports 20+ programming languages and understands language-specific syntax and structure. 

Heeler secrets analysis combines:

• Advanced parsing and regex techniques
• Multi-threaded, high-performance scanning
• Deep traversal of repositories and commit history

This allows Heeler to detect secrets with far greater precision than regex-only tools.

Secret Validation: Identifying Real, Exploitable Risk

Detection alone isn’t enough. Heeler Secrets goes further by validating whether a detected secret is actually usable.

Heeler uses two complementary layers of validation to determine real risk:

1. Checksum-Aware Validation 

Many modern credentials include built-in checksums that allow tools to verify whether a token is structurally valid—without making any external API calls.

Heeler supports checksum-aware matching to:

• Reject structurally invalid or fake tokens immediately
• Eliminate false positives before live validation
• Align with modern token formats that use prefix + checksum designs

Why this matters:

• No API calls required
• Faster validation
• Near-zero false positives at the earliest stage

2. Active External Validation

When applicable, Heeler performs active validation by checking secrets against live systems, including:

• Cloud service APIs
• Database connectivity tests
• API token verification against real endpoints

Heeler external validation is cross-cloud and multi-platform.

Key Benefits of Heeler Secrets

• Real-time detection across repositories and commit history
• Language-aware scanning with dramatically reduced false positives
• Validation to prioritize real, exploitable risk
• High-performance scanning that scales with enterprise environments

Less Noise. More Signal. Real Risk Reduction.

Heeler Secrets helps security teams spend less time triaging noise and more time eliminating the secrets that truly put their organization at risk. By surfacing only validated, exploitable credentials, Heeler enables faster, more confident remediation.

If you’d like to see Heeler Secrets in action, we’d love to show you how it works.

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