You're right! That's one approach to exploiting this. It's worth considering that multiple approaches, across multiple departments, can be used. A good environ

You're right! That's one approach to exploiting this. It's worth considering that multiple approaches, across multiple departments, can be used. A good environment might use Vault for authentication between services and require that code cannot go into production without a review and enforce it in code. Then you tightly control who has access to the administration of those restrictions and log all usage to somewhere else, such that even if someone does compromise the infrastructure to allow them to insert their back door it can be detected and the culprit identified. Again, you're completely right. Code reviews can be a great way to spot malicious code! You're also right that the Vault usage pattern that parent pointed to definitely has vulnerabilities. It's perhaps worth considering that this approach could be used in a context where it might not be the only defense. Perhaps you could ask parent for a more detailed explanation of their org's information security practices?