At Global PayEX, we take a proactive approach to security — not just for our production systems, but across all layers of our infrastructure, including staging, testing, and development environments.

Recently, a security researcher responsibly disclosed the presence of a configuration file linked to an internal legacy staging environment. The file contained expired, non-production credentials and did not expose any customer data or access to operational systems.

We acted immediately:

• All exposed test credentials were revoked
• The underlying logging behavior was reviewed and removed
• Access to staging endpoints was further hardened
• Our infrastructure scanning was expanded to detect residual signatures from legacy environments

While no data or customer-facing systems were impacted, the disclosure reinforced a valuable point: legacy configurations can linger, especially in fast-evolving environments where CI/CD pipelines, container deployments, and test systems evolve rapidly.

Key Takeaways for Engineering and Security Teams:

• Even expired or unused credentials should be monitored and removed
• Scan regularly for digital remnants of decommissioned environments — logs, tokens, old endpoints
• Automate secrets management and rotation using vaults or managed services
• Limit logging of sensitive configurations, even in internal environments
• Treat staging with the same hygiene as production when it comes to secrets, access control, and observability

We’re grateful to the researcher for their responsible approach. We view these moments not as lapses, but as opportunities to further strengthen our systems and share learnings with the broader fintech and SaaS community.

If you’re a security researcher and would like to report something to us, please reach out at [email protected]. We value responsible collaboration.