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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, all the git repos come from GitHub, and GitHub automatically sends you a warning if you commit access keys of various kinds (and I seem to remember they even de-activate some, maybe AWS keys, automatically? Not 100% sure about this). Most of the keys shown are unlikely to be working, especially the ones older than just a couple of days (either owner notice, or someone else was faster than you, got access and regenerated new keys for themselves)

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GitHub PM here, just confirming that that's correct (re: us sending detected secrets to the relevant service provider, who take action automatically). There's more detail here: https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/abo....

This is probably one of the single most important security measures on the whole internet.

Thanks for keeping an eye out.

> or someone else was faster than you, got access and regenerated new keys for themselves

There are many people who do these types of searches - regularly. If there is any key material checked into gh, consider it immediately compromised, even if the repo is removed.

Tons of automated scraping for these sort of things as well, with the whole flow of "check if key is working, check permissions, if authorized, generate new key and deactivate old one".

Yes. There are indeed several mitigations in place. However, my point was that within 5 seconds of looking at this tool I was able to uncover hundreds of potential issues. There are many other regexs I have on my list. Please don't fall into the trap of "we have anti-virus, so we can't get attacked."

Sorry if I was unclear, my previous comment was about attackers doing that in order to compromise infrastructure, not that companies are doing it in order to defend themselves. But companies probably do it to defend themselves as well, but I'm not as familiar with that as with the other side of things.

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