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Andrei Predoiu - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Sep 21, 2022
At the end of the day, no secrets or confidential keys are getting into our GitHub undetected
Pros and Cons
  • "GitGuardian Internal Monitoring has helped increase our secrets detection rate by several orders of magnitude. This is a hard metric to get. For example, if we knew what our secrets were and where they were, we wouldn't need GitGuardian or these types of solutions. There could be a million more secrets that GitGuardian doesn't detect, but it is basically impossible to find them by searching for them."
  • "GitGuardian Internal Monitoring has helped increase our secrets detection rate by several orders of magnitude."
  • "Right now, we are waiting for improvement in the RBAC support for GitGuardian."
  • "It could be cheaper. When GitHub secrets monitoring solution goes to general access and general availability, GitGuardian might be in a little bit of trouble from the competition, and maybe then they might lower their prices."

What is our primary use case?

Our main use case is operational security. We have a big IT platform. A lot of it is built in-house. We are not a focused IT company. We are a retailer. We have a lot of developers with a lot of different levels and projects. For example, with fashion brands, it is just, "Oh, we want to do this new app," and then they put it on our GitHub. Suddenly, we see all kinds of API keys and secrets in there. This solution is very useful for us because GitGuardian lets us know about them, then we can take care of it.

It is on the cloud. We gave GitGuardian access to our organization and codebase. It just scans it on an ongoing basis.

How has it helped my organization?

Since using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring, we have found potentially enterprise-destroying secrets in our GitHub. For example, if our Git got compromised or we had a rogue employee, they could get a lot of business-critical data, disrupt the business, or put us at very high risk. More or less, we are now somewhat protected against that. Now, we are at a stage where we are just keeping an eye on it. As soon as a developer pushes something or does something, we get informed and act on it. The exposure time is very small. Before GitGuardian, we had secrets for years that we did not know about.

As soon as a new secret is detected, we get an email. We look at it, then contact the developers. It is a very fast process. For example, if it is my code and I pushed it, that is the fastest scenario. It is my problem. GitGuardian finds it, then I can fix it myself. I don't have to call another team, talk to them, etc. It could be within a minute that it is remediated.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is automatic secrets detection, which is quite intelligent. It gives us very few false positives, which is definitely worth it at the end of the day as no secrets or confidential keys are getting into our GitHub undetected.

The majority of false positives are things like test credentials or dummy data that we put in for testing, etc. Therefore, it is not really feasible for GitGuardian to understand which is dummy data and which is real data. They do well in terms of false positives. They work quite hard on them. Sometimes they understand that it is dummy data. 

For certain types of secrets, they can check if it is being used. They will go to Microsoft and check if the key is valid in Microsoft, then tell you, "Hey, this secret is actually live somehow." This is another feature that they are working on that I like.

The breadth of the solution's detection capabilities are really good. We haven't walked upon a piece of code where we question, "Oh, why isn't GitGuardian picking this up?" That's for sure. If there are some secrets in our Git that we don't know about and GitGuardian hasn't found it, I don't think it is likely that we will.

What needs improvement?

For remediation, GitGuardian is quite good at pointing out all the incidents and helping us handle them. However, remediation is mostly in our hands. We have to go in and resettle. If they could detect secrets before they end up in our GitHub, that is the only improvement that would be a meaningful improvement from what they have. 

Right now, we are like the SRE team for the company. We need to monitor all the secrets, because when we give somebody access, they either see nothing or everything in GitGuardian. We would like to be able to tune it so developers can see the secrets that GitGuardian detected in their own repositories and teams. Then, they could manage it themselves. We wouldn't have to be in the middle anymore. We could just supervise and make sure that they do fix it. For example, if they might not care about their secrets getting spilled into Git, then we need to get our stick and chase them around the office.

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For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have not had any issues at all with stability.

We do not do maintenance, per se. We do need to react to all the incidents that the solution finds. We have to triage them if we find false positive or test credentials. It is reacting to GitGuardian's information. We don't have to do anything else.

Four or five people from my team are monitoring the solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I haven't seen any problem with its scaling. We pay per repository, or something like that, but otherwise it is very agile and fast. 

How are customer service and support?

We didn't have to use the technical support for anything. The solution has worked great and we haven't had any issues. We have just had questions, specifically regarding RBAC and self-service type of stuff, but that is more roadmap development.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We actually have a lot of tools for developers to handle and manage their secrets in regards to whatever applications or code they develop, but not all of the teams and developers know how to use those properly. This causes secrets ending up in our codebase. Before we had GitGuardian, we did not understand that certain teams had this blind spot. We thought, "Oh, they know what they are doing. They just forgot, made a mistake, or committed some code by accident." However, we found out some of them had some learning to do.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very quick and simple to do. It takes a few minutes and about 10 clicks to do it.

What was our ROI?

As an engineer, I am not paying for it. We just implement and use it. After using it in the trial, we went into a long-term contract with GitGuardian. That is definitely the business deciding that it is worth it. It is paying for itself.

We realized the benefits from it immediately. We started with a 30-day demo and said, "Just clean up our repository. We will be happy with that." However, it was so useful. It was immediately obvious that it would save our bacon in many situations. We decided to keep it.

GitGuardian Internal Monitoring has helped increase our secrets detection rate by several orders of magnitude. This is a hard metric to get. For example, if we knew what our secrets were and where they were, we wouldn't need GitGuardian or these types of solutions. There could be a million more secrets that GitGuardian doesn't detect, but it is basically impossible to find them by searching for them.

There are the obvious benefits, but they are very hard to count in the security business. Until you get hacked or compromised, your costs are zero, but then you are destroyed. So,  the relationship between cost and time savings is a hard thing to measure. GitGuardian is pulling a lot of the hard work when it comes to this, as it was one of our biggest holes in our security, and GitGuardian plugs it up completely.

We had issues that were ongoing for a long time before we had GitGuardian. I remember that it once took us a month to understand that we did something very bad. GitGuardian would have caught that in a minute. A month in, it was a lot harder to remediate because the solution was pushed out to other teams. It was used by a bunch of people, then we had to take it down and reset everything, etc. It was a much bigger downtime than it could have been.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It could be cheaper. When GitHub secrets monitoring solution goes to general access and general availability, GitGuardian might be in a little bit of trouble from the competition, and maybe then they might lower their prices. The GitGuardian solution is great. I'm just concerned that they're not GitHub.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We played around with others. GitHub has a big advantage because they are GitHub. Their focus is on zero false positives, but we would rather have a few false positives and get everything.

We tried TruffleHog once. I don't remember why, but it didn't work quite right for us. We did see a lot more secrets being detected by GitGuardian than TruffleHog.

We ran GitGuardian and TruffleHog in parallel. We noticed that GitGuardian was finding a bunch of random secrets that TruffleHog did not. I think that GitGuardian is using machine learning, or something like that, to understand Azure, AWS, Google API keys, or standard secrets very commonly pushed into GitHub. They figure out even random API keys or secrets that developers made up by themselves and put them in their code. Other solutions do not detect these unless we put a specific rule for that, but how can we put a rule for something that a developer just thought up in their head.

GitGuardian's surveillance perimeter is better for removing blind spots than any of the other products that we tested.

With the Git solutions, we spent a lot of time doing research. Because we have a big contract with GitHub, we were leaning heavily towards them. GitHub relies on some very hard-coded rules that they build themselves about, "What do secrets look like? What does a password look like? What does a key look like?" If you want to catch new types of secrets, you need to make the rules yourself or wait until GitHub adds new rules. While GitGuardian is very flexible, it will show you, "Hey, we think this might be something that you should look at." Then, we just say, "No, it's not," or, "Oh my God. That is definitely something that we should look at." That is the main advantage of GitGuardian.

This is where they are at a disadvantage. One of our biggest issues is that GitGuardian doesn't just search the code as it is right now. It searches the whole history of your code change in every repository. So, if we ever push a secret, even if you deleted it, it is still in the history because that is how Git works. We can reset those keys, secrets, and even delete them from the history itself. We can rewrite the history so they were never there to begin with if you search for them now. What we cannot do is delete them from pull requests and such. Those pull requests are controlled by GitHub and only GitHub can do it. We actually have to call GitHub support to erase the secrets from our requests. So, it's not really GitGuardian's problem; it's GitHub's.

What other advice do I have?

We don't use it for monitoring our developer's public activities. We just focus on our own secrets. We are slowly building up our operational security and our security in general to Git. Right now, we are waiting for improvement in the RBAC support for GitGuardian.

I would say, "Good luck," to someone who says secrets detection isn't a priority. Their priorities are probably wrong. One of the easiest ways for intrusion, as well as losing a lot of money in your company, is getting your secrets leaked somehow.

Secrets detection to a security program for application development is one of the most important things. There are a few stages that application development goes through, it is:

  1. on the developer's machine
  2. in the code repository
  3. packaged as an application
  4. then it is running somewhere.

All these steps have to be secured and taken care of. The application itself needs to be secure from a hacker coming in and trying to use brute force or exploit some software. All of these steps need to be airtight since your security is only as strong as your weakest link. This is so you can make very modern, secure applications. However, if your secrets are in your GitHub and anybody can see them, then those people who have access to one application or code repository, then can see your secrets. They can then take that and do a lot of stuff with it.

I would go with nine out of 10. It would be almost a 10 if it had RBAC.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Jon-Erik Schneiderhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Apr 28, 2022
We feel safe because we don't have valid credentials sitting in our code repositories
Pros and Cons
  • "The secrets detection and alerting is the most important feature. We get alerted almost immediately after someone commits a secret. It has been very accurate, allowing us to jump on it right away, then figure out if we have something substantial that has been leaked or whether it is something that we don't have to worry about. This general main feature of the app is great."
  • "We have seen a return on investment; the amount of time that we would have spent manually doing this definitely outpaces the cost of GitGuardian, as it is saving us about $35,000 a year, so I would say the ROI is about $20,000 a year."
  • "They could give a developer access to a dashboard for their team's repositories that just shows their repository secrets. I think more could be exposed to developers."

What is our primary use case?

We procured it as a secrets and code detection solution. We have code bases, some of which are 10-years-old. We needed a way to comb through all of the Git histories to see if any developers had committed secrets to our code in the past as well as catch any new secrets that developers may accidentally commit in the future.

We are using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

Without GitGuardian, we wouldn't be doing real-time detection of secrets. It would be something that we did periodically. Maybe quarterly or semi-annually, we would review our code for secrets. This means that the mean time to detection would be much longer. GitGuardian reduces our mean time to detect substantially. In addition, we would be finding out about secrets much further away from the time that they were introduced into the code base. We would be chasing people down to give us information about things that they did weeks or months ago. This would drastically reduce the effectiveness of us being able to triage and remediate the leaked secrets.

We don't have to do a periodic review to see if there are any secrets in our code bases. I would estimate, if we were to do that on a quarterly basis, we would be spending an entire week per quarter on it that we don't have to spend now. Therefore, it saves us a week every quarter in pure effort.

If we did not have GitGuardian, our mean time to detection would be much longer. We would have a substantial amount of risk that a set of credentials or a secret was being used maliciously. Every quarter, there was a security incident that came from the risk of these credentials living in our code bases. That might be another week worth of effort that our security team would have to deal with. Since we are catching things immediately, that risk is inherent in our environment and we don't have to worry about a security incident happening. The chances are much lower. We take a week of pure effort to review secrets that went away. Then, there is a week of dealing with security incidents that come from the secrets living in our code bases.

The solution efficiently supports our shift-left strategy.

What is most valuable?

The secrets detection and alerting is the most important feature. We get alerted almost immediately after someone commits a secret. It has been very accurate, allowing us to jump on it right away, then figure out if we have something substantial that has been leaked or whether it is something that we don't have to worry about. This general main feature of the app is great.

Recently, they added a feature that checks the validity of leaked secrets. It will actually reach out and see if the secret that leaked was valid or not. I have found, over the past couple months, this to be a super useful feature. We can go through a lot of the secrets in our code base, which have been detected, and dismiss them if we know that they are invalid secrets that can't be used anyway. This saves us a bunch of time, which is why this has been a really neat feature that has been useful.

I have found that I have been very satisfied with the breadth of the solution's detection capabilities. I don't think it has missed anything. The false positive rate has been very low. Every single time something is detected, it is something that we should look at. It does a very good job of detecting things that we should look at and make a decision on. We don't waste a lot of time chasing down false positives. This means that we feel safe because we don't have valid credentials sitting in our code repositories. If any of our code was breached or any of our developer work stations were compromised or stolen, no one would be able to get valid API credentials out of the Git repositories on those workstations.

The solution helps to quickly prioritize remediation because it allows us to tell which keys are valid versus which ones are invalid. We prioritize the valid ones first. It also lets us sort by detection type, e.g., what kind of secret is it detecting. There are ones that we would obviously prioritize over others, like SSH keys or AWS credentials, versus less sensitive credentials that aren't as concerning. I think it does a great job of helping us prioritize.

GitGuardian provides a feedback form feature that we utilize heavily. When a secret is detected, our process is to generate a feedback form link in GitGuardian, then provide that to the developer. The developer will give us contextual information about the secret, then we can take action. They have also recently released a feature, which we haven't started using yet, called automated playbooks where you can set it up to automatically create that feedback form. Then, it will be emailed to the developer so they get automatically notified that they introduce a secret with a feedback form to fill out. I suspect this will improve our developer's ability to resolve the secrets faster.

What needs improvement?

Six months ago, I would have said improving the ability to automatically get feedback from a developer so we wouldn't need to take action when reaching out, but that has been addressed.

They could give a developer access to a dashboard for their team's repositories that just shows their repository secrets. I think more could be exposed to developers.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for 15 months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I haven't noticed any downtime nor had any issues accessing it. So far, stability and reliability have been excellent.

GitGuardian does not require any maintenance on our side.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

So far, I haven't hit any scalability issues at all.

We have three security engineers who are actively using the service. We also have about 80 developers who are indirectly using the service through the feedback forms.

How are customer service and support?

So far, the support has been great. The only issues that we initially had were with the initial SSO integrations, and they were pretty responsive with that. I think the support has been great, though we haven't needed it much.

I would rate them as nine out of 10. They respond to me almost immediately every time that I have a question, which has been great. I haven't experienced any delays or not had an issue solved.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The solution has increased our secrets-detection rate. Previously, we only detected secrets when someone saw them, which was rare. Especially since a large portion of our secrets are in the Git history, not in the current state of the repository, we were only made aware of 10% of the secrets before. Now, we are probably in the 90 percentile.

How was the initial setup?

There was a ramp up period. When we set it up and linked it up, we had to review all the initial findings and process them. That took a significant amount of time.

What was our ROI?

We just weren't doing this before we had GitGuardian. It has enabled us to do something that we weren't able to do before. If we were doing it manually, then we might have spent 200 hours doing this manually over the past year. So, we just wouldn't do it if we didn't have something like GitGuardian.

The solution has significantly reduced our mean time to remediation, by three or four months. We wouldn't know about it until we did our quarterly or semi-annual review for secrets and scan for secrets.

We have seen a return on investment. The amount of time that we would have spent manually doing this definitely outpaces the cost of GitGuardian. It is saving us about $35,000 a year, so I would say the ROI is about $20,000 a year.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

If you were to run a proof of concept with GitGuardian and see all of the things that it detects, then you would probably be very surprised. You can tell very quickly what the return on investment will be and how much risk a tool like this can mitigate.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated TruffleHog, but we liked GitGuardian better.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to talk with them about your needs. There are different use cases between security personnel working with GitGuardian versus developer personnel working with GitGuardian.

Secrets being used to access resources is probably one of the most common ways to be involved in a high profile breach these days. If you are not detecting secrets in code, then every developer's machine is a security breach waiting to happen. A developer in your org is going to leave their laptop at a coffee shop one of these days. If they have the code base checked out, and there are valid secrets in that code base, then it is only a matter of time before they get used to accessing resources that they are unauthorized to access. 

This is one of the higher priority things right now because developers are way more likely to commit secrets than I would have ever expected.

We haven't adopted any of the GitGuardian's shield functionalities. We just haven't taken the time to roll that out to all our developers. They have the functionality there, and it works great, but we haven't been able to prioritize the rollout on our end.

Security engineering is using the solution pretty extensively. We are not making use of a lot of the shift-left features. We would like to roll them out over the course of the coming year.

I have been super happy with it. I would rate this solution as nine out of 10. I am just leaving room for building out more features for looping in developers.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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GitGuardian Platform
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Learn what your peers think about GitGuardian Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2026.
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it_user1758780 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Jan 17, 2022
Catches secrets before they have made it into production
Pros and Cons
  • "We have definitely seen a return on investment when it finds things that are real. We have caught a couple things before they made it to production, and had they made it to production, that would have been dangerous."
  • "We have scanned over 20,000 commits in the last month and found 256 secrets that would have made it to production."
  • "It could be easier. They have a CLI tool that engineers can run on their laptops, but getting engineers to install the tool is a manual process. I would like to see them have it integrated into one of those developer tools, e.g., VS Code or JetBrains, so developers don't have to think about it."

What is our primary use case?

We use it mostly to look for secrets in our repositories so we can inform the developers not to do that.

How has it helped my organization?

The recommendation is always get this out of your code. One of the things that they added over the year was the ability to reach out to the developer directly to get feedback. This helps us know if the developer is aware of it or it is actually not a secret. So, we don't have to break out of the app, then go into Slack and ask.

We consider all secrets in the source code a Priority 1. We expect every developer to remediate them as soon as they are notified. We don't have a ranking of what is important. We consider them all Priority 1, getting them done first.

It definitely gets us to catch these secrets earlier, instead of after they have made it into production.

With the new feedback system, it has definitely improved our lives. When my security team gets alarms and we don't immediately know that it is a false positive because it is in the test directory, we have questions sometimes whether it is a secret. We then need to work with them to find out what this thing can actually do. The security team has the ability to immediately reach out to the developer and get feedback via email in a portal, where the developer can see what we see and put comments on it, which has drastically improved our lives. We are a worldwide company so we have engineers in a dozen countries. Sometimes, the engineer who made the bad commit isn't even awake, so sending a Slack message doesn't get a response. This is more pressing, so it helps us.

Every engineer has to use it. As we grow, obviously more engineers will be using it. We will probably be at about 100 engineers by this time next year. I don't think that they have any other features or things that we would grow into on the internal side. 

What is most valuable?

The scanning on pull requests has been the most useful feature. When someone checks in code and they are waiting for another engineer to approve that code, they have a tool that scans it for secrets. There are three places where engineers could realize that they are about to do something dangerous: 

  1. On their own machine. They have to set up tools on their machine to do that, and a lot of the time, they are not going to do that. 
  2. On pull requests before it gets into our main code branch. 
  3. Once it is already in our code branches, which is the least optimal place. This is where we can inject a check before it makes it into our main code branch. This is the most valuable spot since we are stopping bad code from making it into production.

The solution has a 90% to 95% accuracy of detection for its false positive rate. The only time that it is not accurate is when we purposely check in fake secrets for unit tests. That is on us. They have the ability for us to fix this by excluding the test directory, and we are just too nervous to do that.

What needs improvement?

It could be easier. They have a CLI tool that engineers can run on their laptops, but getting engineers to install the tool is a manual process. I would like to see them have it integrated into one of those developer tools, e.g., VS Code or JetBrains, so developers don't have to think about it. However, it is moving in the right direction.

I would like to see them take their CLI tooling and make first-level plugins for major development platforms so I don't have to write a script to help engineers set up the CLI tool for their own workstations. That could use some improvement. 

When we add new repositories, they don't immediately get a historical scan. Every now and then, when I log into the interface, it is like, "You have five repositories that haven't had a historical scan," and I have to go enable it. That seems weird. It should be automatic.

It is email, so it is out-of-band, which is what we need. It would be cooler if it could be done through Slack or some other means for more urgency. However, it meets our needs. Most of the time, our security team is US-based. A lot of our engineers are in European countries and even places like Australia, so there is a lot of asynchronous work.

For how long have I used the solution?

This is our second year of using this solution.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has never gone down, so it seems pretty stable.

Besides clicking the button to say, "Go do historical scans," it takes care of itself once it has been set up. Every now and then, I just happen to be in there, see it, and I push the button. So, there is about a week a year when I get around to doing this action. We almost never need to go into the console, because going into the console is just something you do as a check up to make sure everything is healthy.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have over 500 repositories. We get detections within seconds of people making those commits. It seems like it can scale to any size that we would need.

We are a very flat organization. Everybody is essentially a software engineer, including our security team. We have about 70 engineers today who are all just building software.

How are customer service and support?

I haven't actually needed to use the technical support. I would assume it is great. Everything that we have done with them so far has been great.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The breadth of the solution’s detection capabilities is the best one out there. I came from a very large Fortune 100 insurance company where we used a couple different products. They were full of false positives and noise, and in my opinion, not that valuable. I have not received a single false positive, which wasn't quickly apparent that it was something like a test credential, since we have been using this product.

We had some internal scanning previously. I don't have really strong metrics of how it was before, but there was always a concern, "Are there things we are missing?" When you use homegrown tools, you don't know. Now, we have about a 20-hour mean time remediation, which is less than a day. That is really good. We have scanned over 20,000 commits in the last month and found 256 secrets that would have made it to production. That is very impactful to me.

We have tried a bunch of open-source solutions, the biggest one being TruffleHog. The main reason for switching was lack of good detection. It pretty much thinks any complex string is a password, so the signal-to-noise ratio was extremely high. That was a huge toil for us, trying to tune it and get rid of all the noise so the engineers could actually work.

How was the initial setup?

It was very painless. We just had to give it access to our GitHub environment, then we immediately got value. The only place where it takes preparation is if you want to move it all the way into a developer's workstation because they need an API key and a binary. They have to configure Git to use it. That is six or seven steps, which is a little toilsome.

There was one requirement. When we set up SSO, the documentation wasn't super clear. We had to go back and forth during implementation to get the right settings so we could single sign-on into it. There were some requirements where we had to get information from their implementation on what we needed to put into Okta and how to configure it. 

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen a return on investment when it finds things that are real. We have caught a couple things before they made it to production, and had they made it to production, that would have been dangerous. For example, AWS secrets, if that ever got leaked, would have allowed people full access to our environment. Just catching two or three of those a year is our return on investment. 

It definitely increased our secrets detection rate. My personal opinion is that our custom-built tooling was basically useless, so it has increased our detection rate by 100% because we didn't have metrics prior to it. Our engineers were shocked and surprised at how often they were getting notifications, which tells me that our secrets detection rate has vastly improved.

The solution has helped to increase our security team's productivity. We don't have to spend our time running scans in repositories to see if they contain secrets. Within 10 seconds of a commit, we know whether it contains a secret. 

I would probably spend a couple hours a week just running open-source tools, trying to find secrets and seeing if anything bad was going on. Now, we just get low-priority service tickets, when they get opened, and whomever is on-call deals with those. I have seen a couple a week now and then, but they usually take five to 10 minutes to resolve.

The solution has reduced our mean time to remediation. We are down to less than a day. In the past, without context, knowing who made the commit, or kind of secret it was, sometimes it was taking us a lot longer to determine the impact and what actions needed to be taken. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I know they do public monitoring, which is a different product, but it is a little expensive and we don't have anything public. So, we probably wouldn't go that way. 

The internal side is cheap per user. It is annual pricing based on the number of users.

It was a trivial cost compared to pretty much any security tool in our organization. It was a no-brainer for me to do. 

It is a trivial cost compared to static code analysis, where we are paying something like $50 a user. I don't know what this is per user, but it is probably less than $10. It provides a lot more value and is just the right thing to do.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at Snyk, GitHub CodeQL that has some secrets detection, and another solution. They either lacked depth or were more expensive.

What other advice do I have?

Read the news. Source code is a huge wealth of knowledge. It also happens to exist on pretty much every developer's workstation, which they probably take home with them. You probably don't want your secrets being all over the country.

Make the detection of a secret a blocking action so you can't deploy until you have resolved it. When we first started, we had it as a non-blocking informative action and were shocked at how many times an engineer just wants to go home on a weekend and pushes the button anyway. Then, you have clean-up and investigative work to do. Make it blocking so they have to do the right thing. One of the things that we have as a motto is, "Our goal is security. Make it easy to do the right thing so you do the right thing and don't try to work around it." If you know this will block, then you will make sure it doesn't happen.

There is a lot of disagreement on what a secret is. For example, Slack has webhook URLs, where when you send a message to it, it will then post it into a company's Slack. A lot of developers have said that because those are publicly available on the Internet, if you find one, you can post to it. That means it is not a secret, but I would disagree, because you can use it for phishing attacks or to confuse the company. They can take bad actions or sometimes start automations. We spend a lot of time discussing whether a finding is a real secret when it probably always is, from my perspective, but we have to convince developers that it is.

Secrets detection as a security program for application development is table stakes. You need to have it.

I would rate GitGuardian Internal Monitoring as 9 out of 10. The CLI needs to be easier. The rest of it is perfect.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Ferdinand Boas - PeerSpot reviewer
Ferdinand BoasManager, Product Marketing at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Vendor

Hi Don, Ferdinand from GitGuardian here.
Thanks so much for this extensive review.Here's a quick update: our Visual Studio Code extension is now available. I recommend checking it out because preventing secrets early makes remediation less costly. You can try it from the marketplace https://marketplace.visualstud... More info about this  => https://blog.gitguardian.com/v...

Director of Development at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Nov 24, 2021
Gives us more visibility into secrets in our code and helps to create awareness of security
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of GitGuardian is that it finds tokens and passwords. That's why we need this tool. It minimizes the possibility of security violations that we cannot find on our own."
  • "Overall, I like this tool; we have used it for a few years and I'm very impressed, and I'm happy with it as a tool and with the vendor as a company."
  • "There is room for improvement in its integration for bug-tracking. It should be more direct. They have invested a lot in user management, but they need to invest in integrations. That is a real lack."

What is our primary use case?

We monitor our GitHub repositories for security violations and secrets. We have our organization on github.com for infrastructure as code and our use case is to find security violations as soon as possible. When development uses active tokens or passwords on github.com, we need to immediately escalate things to the right person, so they will be removed.

We started with public monitoring and switched to internal.

How has it helped my organization?

We have not tracked whether there has been a decrease in false positives, but GitGuardian has helped us to keep input clean, as much as possible, for infrastructure. 

It also gives us more visibility and helps to create awareness about security in our code.

Another benefit is that the speed of remediation has been significantly improved because we get notification immediately, as issues are detected, very close to the check-in time. We are then able to assign them to the responsible party for correction, according to our SLA.

There are times where it finds issues every two days, but of course, some of them are false positives. But our data for October, 2021 shows a 48 percent decrease in incidents from previous months, and that's a very good sign that development is reading our reports.

GitGuardian also efficiently supports our shift-left strategy. It gives us the ability to provide more information, and earlier, to development. That means when the time comes for releases, the code is clean from a security standpoint.

Using the solution, we have also seen an increase in the secrets-detection rate. We didn't have a previous solution, so in that sense, when we started to use it, the increase was 100 percent. For infrastructure as code, the increase is significant. Compared to the previous year, the dashboard shows it is 73 percent.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of GitGuardian is that it finds tokens and passwords. That's why we need this tool. It minimizes the possibility of security violations that we cannot find on our own. We need to find out immediately when development breaks the rules.

Issues are detected pretty quickly. The tool, from an administration standpoint, is very easy to support, and it has good audit-log visibility.

The breadth of GitGuardians' detection capabilities is very good. I like it. 

What needs improvement?

In three years, we have had only one major hiccup, a development bug that was very quickly fixed. 

There is room for improvement in its integration for bug-tracking. It should be more direct. They have invested a lot in user management, but they need to invest in integrations. That is a real lack.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for the last three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is pretty good. Currently, we use it for internal monitoring but I'm looking to extend it to external as well. It depends on budget, but I'm trying to get us to start using it for that in the next few months.

I also plan to start utilizing webhooks for integrations.

How are customer service and support?

We have used their standard technical support once. Our experience with them was good. It was pretty quick and it was during a moment when we had a bad release and we had to do a rollback. They were quick to respond.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

It was a pretty easy, straightforward installation, and we got results immediately.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, because we have an on-premises installation, we have to do upgrades periodically. But the maintenance does not require a lot of time, maybe an hour per month. It's pretty cheap to support. It's very easy to upgrade, and they happen once every couple of months. We are using version 1.29.1. In a reply from one of my administrators about the upgrade, he said it was done during a coffee break.

We have a little under 100 people who use it actively, in our security team and development management.

What was our ROI?

We have seen ROI because GitGuardian has found some secrets that were checked in as part of the code and it helped us to prevent an area of possible attack on our corporate network and resources. In the same way, it protects our customers. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's a little bit expensive.

When you have a large organization, you would like to involve as many of your developers as possible. It's really expensive when you have 600 or 1,000 developers. That will push your price to close to $100,000 a year. So it's not a cheap solution. You have to create the correct interface to keep it in line with your budget.

For us, there are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees because we deploy it internally. If we deployed it in the cloud, we would incur infrastructure costs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We compared GitGuardian to GitHub's features. GitGuardian was chosen because it has superior functionality when it comes to detection.

What other advice do I have?

If a colleague in security at another company were to tell me that secrets detection isn't a priority, I would tell him I highly recommend this product. We have achieved very good results. Secrets detection is one of the top-five priorities in a security program for any development. It defends the company's interests and secrets. There's an old saying, "You cannot trust your developers." You always need to check their work.

The only issue that I can see is that sometimes an organization deploys a tool but does not utilize it as much as it could. That is the impression I have gotten from speaking with my colleagues at different companies.

Overall, I like this tool. We have used it for a few years and I'm very impressed. I'm happy with it as a tool and with the vendor as a company.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Director Cloud DevOps SRE at a tech company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Mar 8, 2023
Helps us to quickly prioritize remediation and has improved the coordination between developers and security personnel
Pros and Cons
  • "The entire GitGuardian solution is valuable. The product is doing its job and showing us many things. We get many false positives, but the ability to automatically display potential leaks when developers commit is valuable. The dashboards show you recent and historical commits, and we have a full scan that shows historical leaked secrets."
  • "GitGuardian could have more detailed information on what software engineers can do. It only provides some highly generic feedback when a secret is detected. They should have outside documentation. We send this to our software engineers, who are still doing the commits. It's the wrong way to work, but they are accustomed to doing it this way. When they go into that ticket, they see a few instructions that might be confusing. If I see a leaked secret committed two years ago, it's not enough to undo that commit. I need to go in there, change all my code to utilize GitHub secrets, and go on AWS to validate my key."

What is our primary use case?

We use GitGuardian to check standard configurations and scan for possible leaked secrets. Developers and software engineers sometimes commit to AWS keys, login credentials, SMTP databases, and other secrets.

How has it helped my organization?

Given the size of our operation, there's a lot of work to do on the security side in GitHub alone. GitGuardian enables us to avoid leaks in the source code on the GitHub side and helps devise a plan to fix them. Sometimes it doesn't find the leak, but it identifies the type of leak. The solution typically does an excellent job on that part. We can locate the crucial leaks and try to remediate those first. GitGuardian makes the job easier and faster.

It improved the coordination between developers and security personnel. Having a top-down mindset is not so great in terms of security. We have some roadblocks that get in the way of security best practices. GitGuardian's features help us to improve that. People need to improve their mindsets as well. 

We don't have a security team. The company doesn't have this in the core. We began implementing security in our code with GitGuardian, so we don't have a baseline to compare it to. We had nothing, and now we have GitGuardian for GitHub. It works pretty well and helped us to improve for sure. The time-to-remediation depends on the software engineers. We do not do the remediation; they prioritize as they want, so that's the mindset issue again. 

GitGuardian helps us to quickly prioritize remediation. At the same time, we need to work on internal policies regarding what engineers should do. They do not prioritize remediation as much as we think they should. This is a company problem. We didn't have as much emphasis on IT security, cybersecurity, or DevSecOps before we started doing this. We are trying to change their mindset and show how dangerous it could be if secrets are leaked.

We didn't require much preparation to use GitGuardian except for a one-hour training session with GitGuardian. The tool is pretty easy to use and has nice consoles. In one or two hours, we are ready to utilize the tool. The rest was checking configurations and reading documentation. We had to read up on features like single sign-on and how to note a secret leak as a comment in the pull request.

What is most valuable?

The entire GitGuardian solution is valuable. The product is doing its job and showing us many things. We get many false positives, but the ability to automatically display potential leaks when developers commit is valuable. The dashboards show us recent and historical commits, and we have a full scan that shows historical leaked secrets.

I would rate the accuracy an eight out of ten. We get false positives, but it's not because the tool is working incorrectly. Our software engineers commit things like the API key because they know they're unimportant. We consider them false positives because they are not real leaks. The false positive rate is low and will probably improve with time. 

The AWS secrets tool and ggshield have the same functionalities, but I'm not sure how they do everything behind the scenes. GitGuardian has good tech knowledge, but we still see too many false positives. We don't have a granular way to tell GitGuardian on the SaaS side to ignore specific secrets. We have to filter everything after it's done.

GitGuardian has single sign-on integration, which we implemented to make tasks easier for everyone. With SSO, we can send a link to GitGuardian instead of creating a ticket for that. People couldn't engage correctly with GitGuardian before we implemented SSO.

What needs improvement?

GitGuardian could have more detailed information on what software engineers can do. It only provides some highly generic feedback when a secret is detected. They should have outside documentation. We send this to our software engineers, who are still doing the commits. It's the wrong way to work, but they are accustomed to doing it this way. When they go into that ticket, they see a few instructions that might be confusing. If I see a leaked secret committed two years ago, it's not enough to undo that commit. I need to go in there, change all my code to utilize GitHub secrets, and go on AWS to validate my key.

It would be helpful to have small instructions to show developers how to deal with an issue. They ask us what they need to do each time, but it's always more or less the same. GitGuardian could send them clear steps, so they can engage without needing help every time. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used GitGuardian for around six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

GitGuardian is stable for our use case.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have almost a thousand report stores, and it scans correctly, so we don't face any scaling issues.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't remember the specifics of the contract, but we have a one-year license for a set number of developers. It's reasonably priced. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate GitGuardian a ten out of ten. It's a user-friendly product that's ready to go. You don't need anything besides the initial onboarding training to use this tool. If you are concerned about your security and want something ready to go, GitGuardian is an excellent option for a fair price. I recommend it. GitGuardian is a better choice than an open source solution if you are serious about preventing leaks on GitHub and your developers lack security awareness.

Secret detection is one of the essential aspects of application development. Leaked secrets are the main reasons for getting hacked. Often, secrets are leaked by an employee searching and finding secrets they should not, or someone makes a private post public because they don't know the secrets were there. Many bad situations happen because developers don't know what they are doing or don't care. The company mindset needs to change, but we still have a long way to go. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Edvinas Urbasius - PeerSpot reviewer
Cybersecurity Consultant at LCG
Real User
Top 20
Nov 9, 2022
Its straightforward UI is easy to access and monitor.
Pros and Cons
  • "GitGuardian has helped to increase our security team's productivity. Now, we don't need to call the developers all the time and ask what they are working on. I feel the solution bridged the gap between our team and the developers, which is really great. I feel that we need that in our company, since some of the departments are just doing whatever and you don't know what they are doing. I think GitGuardian does a good job of bridging the gap. It saves us about 10 hours per week."
  • "For some repositories, there are a lot of incidents. For example, one repository says 255 occurrences, so I assume these are 255 alerts and nobody is doing anything about them. These could be false positives. However, I cannot assess it correctly, because I haven't been closing these false positives myself. From the dashboard, I can see that for some of the repositories, there have been a lot of closing of these occurrences, so I would assume there are a lot of false positives. A ballpark estimate would be 60% being false positives. One of the arguments from the developers against this tool is the number of false positives."
  • "For some repositories, there are a lot of incidents. For example, one repository says 255 occurrences, so I assume these are 255 alerts and nobody is doing anything about them."

What is our primary use case?

Since we have a lot of internal teams, the main team running this tool is composed of developers. Because of the security aspects of GitGuardian, they figured that we needed to bridge the gaps and work together.

GitGuardian creates a lot of alerts in the code. If someone uses new passwords or secrets, then we can see in which repository as well as who used it and left their password in the code. We monitor these things. However, they haven't given us a permission to work with alerts since it is more for analysis purposes right now, seeing what problems we have in the company, e.g., we are seeing a lot of people just dumping passwords in the code, which is not a good approach.

Our main strategy is focusing on moving testing quality and performance earlier on in the development process. Developers are focusing on this quite heavily.

We are using the latest version.

How has it helped my organization?

It quickly prioritizes remediation, but individual teams get to decide how they do things. The problem, where we work, is that we work in an agile setup. Each team decides how they want to do it. Sometimes, developers are prioritizing different things though. That is the reason why we started working with developers. We were trying to push the security agenda, because developers would just like to work on code. Most of them don't care about security. While this tool has helped with prioritization, a problem can be that developers are not taking the security prioritization into the mix.

Two weeks ago, I spoke with the main lead of the developer team. They said that we shouldn't close alerts ourselves, but the tool helps. From a security perspective, we collect the data since we will use it in the future with analysis, but the developers are closing the alerts. GitGuardian really helps us to collaborate since we can just copy and paste a particular incident, then ask them, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?" That really helps.

GitGuardian has helped to increase our security team's productivity. Now, we don't need to call the developers all the time and ask what they are working on. I feel the solution bridged the gap between our team and the developers, which is really great. I feel that we need that in our company, since some of the departments are just doing whatever and you don't know what they are doing. I think GitGuardian does a good job of bridging the gap. It saves us about 10 hours per week.

What is most valuable?

I like the ease of the UI. The UI is very straightforward. It is easy to access and monitor. There are not a lot of hoops to jump through. Click on it, and everything is in the main dashboard. This is really helpful. With other systems that we are using in our company, we have a lot of other dashboards, and sometimes you need to click five times to see something. With GitGuardian, it is very easy to access alerts, which is very nice. I like the UI aspect of it because it is very easy to use.

The span of the solution's detection capabilities is good and very quick. Alerts and incidents poop up immediately.

The range of technology that the solution covers is huge, which is nice. There are broad SMTP credentials for generic passwords. 

The documentation is good and very insightful.

What needs improvement?

I am unsure if they have a mobile app. That could be a feature or improvement in the future. A lot of our security dashboards don't have a phone app. A phone app helps because you can monitor things on the go. We are using the Darktrace solution that allows alerts on our phones, and we configure the alert threshold. That helps a lot. I think that a mobile app could be something that could be added in the future pipeline, if there is any demand.

For how long have I used the solution?

From a security perspective, we received access, as analysts, six months ago. We are using it every day to analyze things.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Performance-wise, I haven't observed any bugs or problems. It worked from day one. We never had any hiccups, and I haven't observed anything bad.

No maintenance is needed from our side.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

From the developer's perspective, they have said that there may be a problem with scaling. This may be a potential problem in the future.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support has been very nice. The salespeople and technical people at GitGuardian are very approachable. We have no issues connecting with them. I reach some of them on LinkedIn, so I don't even have to create a support ticket or something. If I have a question, I just write to them on LinkedIn, and say, "Hey guys, what is up with that?" or, "What is this problem?" They are very quick to answer, and I like that approach. They are very open to communication. It is not very formal. In some other companies, you have to create a ticket and wait three days. Because they started very recently, they have a different approach, which is good. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

It is easy to contact GitGuardian. Contact them for a demo. I would start there. That would be my advice because the people working there are very friendly and knowledgeable. 

They were very eager to provide a demo to us. It was just one hour and they gave us information with an explanation.  

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

GitGuardian was our first tool of this type.

How was the initial setup?

It has worked from day one. The UI and design are very easy to understand; it is not complicated. The left menu has incidents, parameters, and API integration settings. It is so obvious, so there are no issues with it. Whereas, other systems have a problem. For example, we are using McAfee, and in order to find something, you need to jump through settings, going to this and that. With GitGuardian, I am seeing everything in one place and don't need to do a lot of button gymnastics.

What was our ROI?

GitGuardian has helped us increase our secrets detection rate by a lot, in the ballpark of 60%.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

With GitGuardian, we didn't need any middlemen. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We use the GitHub integration. In our company, we use a lot of different systems. I can see CircleCI, Azure, GitHub Actions, and other alert options. In the future, we will implement that. However, just knowing that there are options is already nice since some other security tools don't have many options. That is what I like about GitGuardian, there are a lot of choices. You can plan your strategy about how you will implement things and what you are going to do.

What other advice do I have?

There are product owners, senior developers, and day-to-day developers using this solution. There are 40 members connected to it, including 35 developers who are using it. My colleagues and I spend at least two hours a day going to the dashboard and looking into things.

If a security colleague at another company said, "Secrets detection is not a priority," then he is a very bad guy. It is a huge problem now with all the secrets in the code. It is important to monitor them, as it is a growing problem. I just heard a podcast this morning about security, where they talked about Symantec who did a research study about this particular issue. It seems like a lot of apps have this problem. It is really important to monitor these things and know about them in the code. Otherwise, you risk exposing things, then malicious actors can use them. 

The security guy needs to go back to school, do some training, and really be open-minded about it since it is a growing problem. It will continue to grow as a problem since a lot of developers forget that IT security aspect. They just copy and paste stuff, then leave it in the code and forget about it. That is how attacks happen; somebody slipped, making a mistake or misconfiguration.

Secrets detection to a security program is very important for application development because developers are just ignoring it. They just commit the code, then the secrets are there. I feel GitGuardian is a good tool because it shows this to your face. As we continue monitoring, we plan to do a presentation of our findings to management.

Overall, I would give it a seven out of 10. There are a lot of good things about GitGuardian, but there were some hiccups with the development. I feel there are some small things that are not working for our developer team. The solution is great, but it would be bad to say, "10," without acknowledging some of the problems. So, seven is good and fair.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Michael Schmitz - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Engineering at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Real User
Oct 24, 2022
Alerts us about secrets being leaked so that we can remediate, and shows vulnerabilities in open-source software
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the alerts when secrets are leaked and we can look at particular repositories to see if there are any outstanding problems. In addition, the solution's detection capabilities seem very broad. We have no concerns there."
  • "Previously, secrets would be leaked and nobody would ever hear about it, but now we actually have alerts and the opportunity to follow up with researchers to deal with these problems, turning something that had the potential to take an hour out of someone's day into a quick, easy, minimal, and more effective process."
  • "We have been somewhat confused by the dashboard at times."

What is our primary use case?

We work for a research institute and there are a lot of disparate security practices. A lot of people work for us for short periods of time, through internships and other temporary positions, and it's been hard to communicate security best practices across the company. GitGuardian helps prevent the leaking of secrets, but it's also for educating our company about our policies.

How has it helped my organization?

The main benefit is that, previously, secrets would be leaked and nobody would ever hear about it. Now, we actually have alerts and the opportunity to follow up with researchers to deal with these problems. It has provided the opportunity to collaborate on remediation rather than not knowing there are issues.

In addition, we do a review of security alerts when we open-source software. We used to have a script that we wrote that we would run to scan these repositories. It would produce a lot of noise. Now, we go to GitGuardian and immediately we have a dashboard that tells us what vulnerabilities there are.

GitGuardian has helped to modestly increase security team productivity whenever we do a review of open-source software for security leaks. Previously, that would take about an hour per repository and now it takes five minutes. We have 1,500 repositories, which is a lot. We're open-sourcing them weekly, so it doesn't amount to a huge number of hours, but it's turned something from fairly inconvenient, that had the potential to take an hour out of someone's day, to something that's just quick, easy, minimal, and more effective.

It has also helped to decrease false positives.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the alerts when secrets are leaked and we can look at particular repositories to see if there are any outstanding problems. In addition, the solution's detection capabilities seem very broad. We have no concerns there.

In terms of the accuracy of detection and the solution's false positive rate, we had to make some adjustments, but now that we've made those adjustments we're very happy with where we are.

We have also used the dev in the loop feature and it works well when it comes to remediating an incident. For collaboration between developers and security teams it's very good.

What needs improvement?

We have been somewhat confused by the dashboard at times.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for about a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have no concerns about its stability at all.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We also have no concerns about its scalability. Maybe we'll hit something, but I've seen no evidence of scalability issues.

We're using it for about one-third of our organization. We'd like to use it for more.

How are customer service and support?

We've always gotten quick, thorough responses from their technical support.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not have a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

It was very easy to get started. There was an amazing trial where they showed us vulnerabilities we already had.

It requires no maintenance on our side.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's not cheap, but it's not crazy expensive either. We negotiate a price and it stays at that price, which is very nice.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did evaluate other products over a fairly long period of time, but GitGuardian stood out in that it was something we would pay for and we wouldn't have to worry about it. It would just work.

What other advice do I have?

I would tell a security colleague who says that secrets detection is not a priority that it might be worth trying this tool out and seeing what it shows you before jumping to that conclusion.

The importance of secrets detection to a security program for application development is tough to determine because the biggest players already detect secrets on GitHub and disable those tokens. If I pretend those don't exist, then it's extremely important. Since they do exist, it's somewhat important.

Try out GitGuardian Internal Monitoring. It's easy to try it out and you can go from there.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Theo Cusnir - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Security Engineer at PayFit
Real User
Oct 16, 2022
Detects and alerts us about leaks quickly, and enables us to filter and prioritize occurrences
Pros and Cons
  • "One thing I really like about it is the fact that we can add search words or specific payloads inside the tool, and GitGuardian will look into GitHub and alert us if any of these words is found in a repository... With this capability in the tool, we have good surveillance over our potential blind spots."
  • "GitGuardian has increased our detection rate by a factor of 10 at least."
  • "I would like to see improvement in some of the user interface features... When one secret is leaked in multiple files or multiple repositories, it will appear on the dashboard. But when you click on that secret, all the occurrences will appear on the page. It would be better to have one secret per occurrence, directly, so that we don't have to click to get to the list of all the occurrences."
  • "I would like to see improvement in some of the user interface features."

What is our primary use case?

We use it to detect if our engineers are leaking secrets on public GitHub repositories. If any Payfit employee is leaking secrets in their own repositories or, in the Payfit repositories, they will be flagged by either the GitGuardian internal solution or the public one.

How has it helped my organization?

Overall, it has given us more trust in our engineers and in our global security. We know that if someone is leaking something critical or a secret, it will be detected pretty fast by GitGuardian and we will be alerted in minutes. It has helped us be more relaxed about those situations.

Its false positive rate is also really low. With the Public Monitoring solution, we have not had any false positives. With the Internal Monitoring solution, we have had a few, but that has been completely manageable. We can see them directly when checking the dashboard. It has definitely helped decrease false positives. In fact, GitGuardian helped us to be much more accurate because we used to use a tool we had built internally but it did not work very well. So we decided to go with GitGuardian and the accuracy is very nice.

In addition, it has definitely helped increase our secrets detection rate. Before we used this solution, we were doing manual research and that was not very effective. GitGuardian has increased our detection rate by a factor of 10 at least. And our mean time to remediation has been decreased because we are warned pretty fast when there is a leak.

It's also nice because it finds personal secrets of our developers. We have had a few situations where we detected a secret that was leaked in a personal repository of one of our engineers. The secret was not one from our company, it was the employee's. We warned them about this and they were pretty happy.

What is most valuable?

One thing I really like about it is the fact that we can add search words or specific payloads inside the tool, and GitGuardian will look into GitHub and alert us if any of these words is found in a repository. For example, if I put "Payfit" in the tool, I will be alerted every time someone is committing with that word in the code. It's really useful for internal domain names, to detect if someone is leaking internal code. With this capability in the tool, we have good surveillance over our potential blind spots.

It can detect a leak in 10 minutes. We had an experience with one of our engineers who had leaked a secret, and 10 minutes afterward we had a warning from GitGuardian about the leak. It's very effective. We looked at the commit date and the current date with hours and minutes and we could see that the commit had been made 10 minutes ago. As a result, we are sure it is pretty fast.

Another feature, one that helps prioritize remediation, is that you can filter the findings by criticality. That definitely helps us to prioritize which secrets we should rotate and delete.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see improvement in some of the user interface features. Some things are not that easy to use. The most impactful is the occurrences feature. When one secret is leaked in multiple files or multiple repositories, it will appear on the dashboard. But when you click on that secret, all the occurrences will appear on the page. It would be better to have one secret per occurrence, directly, so that we don't have to click to get to the list of all the occurrences.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using GitGuardian Public Monitoring for about eight months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is pretty good. We have not had any outages.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is nice because their infrastructure is pretty powerful. They are able to monitor all our repositories and, with all the GitHub repositories they have to monitor for all their customers, it's working really fast and well.

We have 130 people using the solution, mostly engineers, but there are some project managers who use it as well.

How are customer service and support?

We had regular contact with their technical support for onboarding meetings and the like. They were very helpful. They asked us for our feedback a lot and asked if we had any ideas for improving the tool. And they have provided features for us based on our feedback.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

What was our ROI?

Our ROI is in the fact that we have detected a lot of secrets that were publically leaked, as well as secrets in our repositories that were not in the vault.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's a bit expensive, but it works well. You get what you pay for. You get something that is fully managed with a lot of features, and a tool that is very efficient.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at other options. We looked at open-source solutions such as TruffleHog and Gitleaks, but they were not as effective as GitGuardian and they did not have any alerting feature, which was very important for us.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to compare this solution with open-source solutions. If you're not convinced about GitGuardian, benchmark it with other tools. Open-source tools are nice because most of the time they're free, if you don't take the support. But if you compare GitGuardian with other solutions, you will see that the efficiency is really not the same.

If a colleague in security said to me that secrets detection is not a priority, I would say that's a mistake. Most of the big security problems come from either social engineering attacks or credential stuffing. So it's really important to know that your engineers and your employees are going to leak secrets. That's life. Most of the time, it's due to mistakes. But if it happens, we need to act on it, and a solution such as GitGuardian is a really nice way to monitor and really efficiently detect these leaks.

Secrets detection is important to a security program for application development, especially if your company is growing and you have a lot of engineers. The more engineers there are, the more there is potential for leaks to happen.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side, except for putting the GitHub API token inside Gitguardian so that it has access to our repositories to detect potential secrets.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Melvin Mohadeb - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at PayFit
Real User
Sep 23, 2022
Detection and alerting happen very fast, making remediation easier for devs
Pros and Cons
  • "The breadth of the solution detection capabilities is pretty good. They have good categories and a lot of different types of secrets... it gives us a great range when it comes to types of secrets, and that's good for us."
  • "Before this solution, we didn't have anything for secret detection; we went from zero to having something, and thanks to the tool, we have decreased the risk, automated what we did manually, and definitely increased our security team productivity."
  • "There are some features that are lacking in GitGuardian. The more we grow and the more engineers we have, the more it will become difficult to assign an incident because the assignment is not automatic. I know they are working on that and we are waiting for it."
  • "There are some features that are lacking in GitGuardian."

What is our primary use case?

The main goal is to be alerted and to react when a secret has been leaked in our code base.

We have GitGuardian linked to our code-based storage on GitHub. GitGuardian also has a notification integration with Slack which is what we use internally for communication. We are alerted on Slack, "There's an incident here on GitGuardian for a secret leak on GitHub." From there, we can go into incidents and start managing the incident.

How has it helped my organization?

Before this solution, we didn't have anything for secret detection. We went from zero to having something. We really needed it. It was really a big risk for us without it. The more the company grows, and the more we have employees coming and leaving, the risk of secrets leaks in our asset base is really big. Thanks to the tool, we have decreased the risk.

Before, what we did was check the code manually to detect secrets. Now, it's automated, and that's a big change for us. Security team productivity has also increased because it helps us manage incidents. Everything that GitGuardian does is something we don't have to do manually. That is definitely increasing our productivity.

It also supports a shift-left strategy.

Dev in the loop is pretty good when it comes to collaboration between developers and security teams. The fact that GitGuardian is very fast in detecting and alerting makes remediation easier. When a secret leaks, we get the alert within 30 seconds, or a maximum of one minute, which is very fast. Once we get the alert, we can warn the developer and it will not require a big change because they would have just committed the secret. It won't be a secret that was committed multiple days before. The few times we used it, it definitely made remediation faster.

What is most valuable?

The detection feature works really well. It's pretty fast and we are alerted very well.

Also, the breadth of the solution detection capabilities is pretty good. They have good categories and a lot of different types of secrets. There is one generic type when they don't know specifically what it is, but it gives us a great range when it comes to types of secrets, and that's good for us.

The detection accuracy is also good. We haven't had a lot of false positives, which is nice. We are not aware of any false negatives, such as not being alerted when a real secret has leaked.

The web interface helps to quickly prioritize remediation as you can manage incidents. You have to indicate the severity of an incident after seeing the secret, knowing where it is used. We definitely use this feature.

What needs improvement?

The good thing about GitGuardian is that we don't get many false positives. The issue with this kind of tool is that it detects secrets but it can also detect some things that are not secrets, and you have to manage an incident for something that is not an incident. But we tested multiple secret detection tools and GitGuardian was pretty good, not having many false positives.

There is also something we shared with them already about user management with teams. They have an integration with Okta to manage our employees' access to the tools. It would be best to have different teams. In our engineering department we have a lot of different teams, and the more we grow the more teams we will have. But currently, you can only assign one person to an incident. We would like to have the ability to assign it to a team because code, in our company, is owned by a team and not one person. That's one feature that's really lacking in GitGuardian.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for about 10 months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any issue with its reliability. It has always worked and we have never had downtime with GitGuardian. It's very good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is definitely not bad, but it's not the biggest strength, for sure. But it's not a "no-go, definitely do not use this tool."

There are some features that are lacking in GitGuardian. The more we grow and the more engineers we have, the more difficult it will become to assign an incident because the assignment is not automatic. I know they are working on that and we are waiting for it.

We currently have 52 members using it. It checks our entire developer worker base. We're satisfied with the current usage, but we'll increase the number of members as we grow.

How are customer service and support?

There have only been rare cases where they didn't answer all my questions. Some things were not possible, but they are very responsive and try to do their best to answer my concerns.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't have a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

I don't remember that there was a lot of preparation involved. It was really just a matter of doing the integration between GitGuardian, GitHub, and Slack. That's all. The implementation of GitGuardian is really easy. You just have to set up the integration, which takes, maybe, five minutes, maximum.

There is no maintenance. We have to manage incidents, but that's the point of the tool. But we don't have to maintain the tool itself. It's SaaS and it works on its own.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We checked Gitleaks, which is a free tool for detecting secrets. Detections were pretty much the same in both GitGuardian and Gitleaks. The main difference was that with Gitleaks, you don't have the interface for incident management. It's really just detection. GitGuardian was the whole environment that we really needed to work at scale.

What other advice do I have?

The tool itself mainly helps us with detection. The whole remediation is done outside of the tool. Once GitGuardian has detected a secret leak, we are alerted and an incident is created in the tool itself. After that, the revocation or rotation of the secret will be done outside of the tool. We use GitGuardian to track the incident and the comments on it, but we don't really manage the secrets directly in it.

We had some issues with the Dev in the loop feature, so we don't use it that much. Dev in the loop is used to share an incident with the developer who committed the secret. But to manage our database in our GitHub organization, we let our developers use their personal emails. Because an email is sent to that address about a secret leak, we are not very fond of it. It works well and is helpful because we don't have to manually send a message to the developer for an incident. We can let the developer manage the whole thing on their own, which is good. We just have this email issue, but other than that, the feature in itself works well.

If a security colleague at another company were to say to me that secrets detection is not a priority, I would disagree. The risk is pretty big when you think about what a secrets leak could do. You don't need to start with a solution like this when your company has, say, five people. But at a certain point, you definitely have to have a secrets detection tool.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
it_user1748559 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of InfoSec at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Real User
Jan 10, 2022
Supports our shift-left strategy with more accurate secrets detection, but Azure DevOps side could be made easier
Pros and Cons
  • "When they give you a description of what happened, it's really easy to follow and to retest. And the ability to retest is something that you don't have in other solutions. If a secret was detected, you can retest if it is still there. It will show you if it is in the history."
  • "Before we had GitGuardian we were blind; we had a lot of false positives with other products, but now GitGuardian has fewer false positives, its secrets detection is more accurate, and it has decreased our false positives by a minimum of 20 percent."
  • "There is room for improvement in GitGuardian on Azure DevOps. The implementation is a bit hard there. This is one of the things we requested help with. I would not say their support is not good, but they need them to improve in helping customers on that side."
  • "There is room for improvement in GitGuardian on Azure DevOps; the implementation is a bit hard there."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for secrets detection.

How has it helped my organization?

Before we had GitGuardian we were "blind." We had no detections, which was very bad. We were using another product on GitHub, similar to GitGuardian, but it was not really as good as GitGuardian. The graphical interface and the detail GitGuardian gives you are really amazing. And there are fewer false positives than any other platform. We are able to notify developers of issues on the spot and tell them, "You have exposed a secret." It is absolutely brilliant.

It has definitely helped to efficiently support a shift-left strategy. Before this, we didn't have any detection, and we had a lot of false positives with other products. That meant people were spending and wasting a lot of time on false positives. That is not the case now. GitGuardian has fewer false positives, which is very advantageous. It has decreased our false positives by a minimum of 20 percent. The secrets detection is more accurate. Before, we had 20 false positives for every real incident. Now, we only get the one, real incident.

In terms of developers and our security team collaborating on remediation, GitGuardian has made everyone feel better. Usually, for developers, security is an overhead, but GitGuardian has never been an overhead. It is always helping developers understand where they did something wrong, and the need to fix it. That's what has allowed us to protect the developers and the company assets from security breaches.

What is most valuable?

The scope of GitGuardian's detection capabilities is better than anything else. When they give you a description of what happened, it's really easy to follow and to retest. And the ability to retest is something that you don't have in other solutions. If a secret was detected, you can retest if it is still there. It will show you if it is in the history.

It also helps to quickly prioritize remediation. They provide a score and, although it depends on the context, because what GitGuardian might say is a high-risk vulnerability might not be for us, it does the job properly. The scoring it gives is amazing.

What needs improvement?

There is room for improvement in GitGuardian on Azure DevOps. The implementation is a bit hard there. This is one of the things we requested help with. I would not say their support is not good, but they need them to improve in helping customers on that side.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using GitGuardian Internal Monitoring for the last year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Every single time I have accessed the platform, it has been available. And every single time I tried to use a feature, it was working. The stability is spot-on.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

In the beginning, they were covering GitHub and then they started doing Azure DevOps. It is scalable and they are getting there.

As long as our company grows and we have more developers, we are going to increase our usage of GitGuardian. It's becoming a very heavy-duty tool that we depend on every single day.

How are customer service and support?

GitGuardian's support is amazing. They helped us to set it up properly all the way. And whenever we give them feedback, they take it into consideration, if it is a new feature. And if it is a bug, they work on it and fix it. The support is superb.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

The preparation needed on our side to start using GitGuardian wasn't anything out of the normal. It included the types of activities we have had to do with any other product. The onboarding was really good because they were there. They helped us the entire time.

Between developers and security personnel, we have about 25 users, but it does not require any type of maintenance on our side.

What was our ROI?

There's no direct return on investment. Security is overhead, but at least I'm sure that we are protecting our company assets, and that's a return on its own.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing and licensing are fair. It isn't very expensive and it's good value.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Dependable and GuardDuty. One of the main differences between these solutions and GitGuardian is the interface. The GitGuardian GUI is very good and much easier to use than anything else. It's very user-friendly. It gives you what you want. You can do as much filtering as you want. 

And another important difference over other technologies is that GitGuardian has fewer false positives, which is very advantageous. Dependable and Guard Duty give you things that are not relevant or that are false positives, at times. That does not happen often with GitGuardian.

What other advice do I have?

If someone at another company were to say to me that secrets detection is not a priority, I would say that's not a very smart approach. Secrets detection is a very essential part of security. It's one of the basics that you need to cover all the time. Otherwise, you're going to expose your endpoints online and you're going to suffer endless attacks. You definitely need to have secrets detection tools. We use a combination of tools, but GitGuardian is my preferred tool.

When it comes to application development, secrets detection is essential to a security program. You need to have it. Otherwise, you'll fail.

In this technology, nothing is perfect yet and it's going to take time. But so far, GitGuardian is the best I've seen. Overall, it's a very good product.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free GitGuardian Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: October 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free GitGuardian Platform Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.