26,400 live cloud and AI credentials exposed across 7.25M public Gitee repositories
Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann published on October 28 the results of a month-long scan of 7.25 million public Gitee repositories, finding 26,400 credentials that were still valid when tested. The largest groups were 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs, 3,805 YouTube API keys, 3,170 DeepSeek keys, 1,489 Zhipu BigModel keys and 1,348 OpenAI keys, with smaller counts for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud and Gemini. Nearly half (12,242) came from 2025 commits, and one was described as an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform. Zimmermann notified the most-affected vendors but not the leaking developers, and could not confirm any revocations, so defenders must assume exposure remains live. Gitee, selected in 2020 by China's MIIT as the base for a national open-source platform, showed a rate of 3.64 working credentials per 1,000 repositories, above prior GitLab (3.11) and Bitbucket (2.39) scans.
Detalhes técnicos
The scan used two secret scanners, TruffleHog and Kingfisher (MongoDB), each validating credentials against the issuing service and reading full commit history, so keys removed from current code were still recovered. TruffleHog found 12,737 valid credentials and Kingfisher 14,664, with only 1,001 overlapping, showing large detector coverage gaps — TruffleHog has no Zhipu detector, while it found nearly all Alibaba Cloud keys. Impact depends on the service: a leaked OpenAI key allows quota abuse, unexpected charges and data loss; an unrestricted Google/YouTube API key works against any API accepting Google Cloud keys.
Remediação
- Treat any key ever pushed to a public Gitee repository as compromised; deleting it or rewriting history does not revoke it.
- Alibaba Cloud: create a new AccessKey pair, migrate apps, disable and delete the old pair; review ActionTrail (90 days) plus per-service logs for OSS/SLS data operations and unexpected charges or resources.
- Google/YouTube: rotate the key, update apps, delete the old key, and apply API restrictions.
- OpenAI: rotate from the API Keys page and set spend limits.
- Do not rely on a single secret scanner; validate detector coverage against the services actually in use.
Linha do tempo
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26,400 live cloud and AI credentials exposed across 7.25M public Gitee repositories
ler a análise desta fonte ocultar
Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann published on October 28 the results of a month-long scan of 7.25 million public Gitee repositories, finding 26,400 credentials that were still valid when tested. The largest groups were 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs, 3,805 YouTube API keys, 3,170 DeepSeek keys, 1,489 Zhipu BigModel keys and 1,348 OpenAI keys, with smaller counts for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud and Gemini. Nearly half (12,242) came from 2025 commits, and one was described as an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform. Zimmermann notified the most-affected vendors but not the leaking developers, and could not confirm any revocations, so defenders must assume exposure remains live. Gitee, selected in 2020 by China's MIIT as the base for a national open-source platform, showed a rate of 3.64 working credentials per 1,000 repositories, above prior GitLab (3.11) and Bitbucket (2.39) scans.
Technical Details
The scan used two secret scanners, TruffleHog and Kingfisher (MongoDB), each validating credentials against the issuing service and reading full commit history, so keys removed from current code were still recovered. TruffleHog found 12,737 valid credentials and Kingfisher 14,664, with only 1,001 overlapping, showing large detector coverage gaps — TruffleHog has no Zhipu detector, while it found nearly all Alibaba Cloud keys. Impact depends on the service: a leaked OpenAI key allows quota abuse, unexpected charges and data loss; an unrestricted Google/YouTube API key works against any API accepting Google Cloud keys.
Remediation
- Treat any key ever pushed to a public Gitee repository as compromised; deleting it or rewriting history does not revoke it.
- Alibaba Cloud: create a new AccessKey pair, migrate apps, disable and delete the old pair; review ActionTrail (90 days) plus per-service logs for OSS/SLS data operations and unexpected charges or resources.
- Google/YouTube: rotate the key, update apps, delete the old key, and apply API restrictions.
- OpenAI: rotate from the API Keys page and set spend limits.
- Do not rely on a single secret scanner; validate detector coverage against the services actually in use.