Securing your verification API token: rotation and blast radius
APIZONE
·
·updated 8 Sep 2026 ·
1 min read
One token, full access, checked into a repo three years ago. Here is how to avoid that, and what to do the day it happens.
On this page
Treat it like a password
The token authenticates every call and spends your balance. Keep it in a secrets manager, never in source control, never in client-side code. Inject it at runtime.
Rotate deliberately
Rotate on a schedule and immediately on any suspicion of exposure. A clean rotation is: generate the new token, deploy it, confirm traffic moved, revoke the old one. Regenerating from the dashboard invalidates the old token, so sequence the deploy.
Watch the spend
A leaked token shows up as a spend anomaly before anything else. Alert on unusual volume so you catch it in hours, not on the monthly invoice.