alt Hacker NewsIt's ridiculed because its no protection on its own when an attacker is motivated. Its fine to add as an additional layer though if you want to make your space mildly custom to protect against broader attacks.
I don't see how its necessarily relevant to this attack though. These guys were storing creds in clear and assuming actors within their network were "safe", weren't they?
TFA cites "env var enumeration", likely implying someone got somewhere they shouldn't and typed 3 characters, as the critical attack that led to customers getting compromised.
My point is sensitive secrets should literally never be exported into the process environment, they should be pulled directly into application memory from a file or secrets manager.
It would still be a bad compromise either way, but you have a fighting chance of limiting the blast radius if you aren't serving secrets to attackers on an env platter, which could be the first three characters they type once establishing access.