DevOps Interview DropAdvanced TierScenario+50 XP on read

A secret was committed six months ago and exists in hundreds of commits. What do you do?

Core Summary

Treat it as a security incident, not a Git cleanup task. Rotate first, then work out the blast radius, then decide honestly whether rewriting history is worth the cost. The rewrite is the most visible part of the response and the least important one.

Hints

Hint 1: Rotation is remediation; history rewriting is hygiene

Hint 2: Who could have read it, and did anyone use it?

Hint 3: Forks and caches keep copies you cannot rewrite

Reported in interviews at Cloudflare, GitLab, Datadog