Mallory Mooney discusses the leading cause of cloud security incidents, which are compromised secrets such as leaked API and SSH keys, credentials, and session tokens. To minimize these risks, it's recommended to implement processes that prevent storing secrets in the first place, creating auto-expiration policies, and using centralized identity management tools. The article highlights the importance of visibility into existing secrets, monitoring when secrets need to be revoked or have expired, detecting anomalies and their usage, and tracking changes to secrets or their policies. It also emphasizes the need to phase out vulnerable secrets with secure alternatives, such as Datadog's security capabilities.