Operation Burn Password.txt
A case study in building secure tooling without triggering revolt — and how we replaced bad habits without forcing new ones.
Problem:
A small team was sharing credentials in the wild — plaintext files, Slack messages, sticky notes. They weren’t negligent. They were normal.
No budget for enterprise vaults. No appetite for training.
But they knew they had to level up — and not in a way that triggered revolt.
What they needed wasn’t a product.
They needed a path to better behavior — without changing how they worked overnight.
Approach:
We applied the Heartbred pulse: cut the overhead, solve the root, design for adoption.
- We embedded security inside Slack — their only shared habit.
- We used Cloudflare Workers to create an API with no public face — pure obscurity by design.
- We skipped dashboards, logins, and permission managers — replaced them with slash commands and ACLs.
- We let admins control everything with language, not UI.
Every part of the system was scoped for real-world use, not ideal-world compliance.
No one had to change what they do — they just had to do it slightly better.
Outcome:
No more shared files.
No fights.
No forgotten tooling.
Just a secure, team-scaled flow that earned trust by staying out of the way.
Powered By
Cypher API
AI-EnhancedA secure Cloudflare Worker-based backend that encrypts and stores secrets, manages access control, and serves both Slack and API clients.
Technologies:
Cypher Slack App
AI-EnhancedA secure Slack bot interface for managing team credentials with ephemeral commands and admin-based access control.