26,400 working cloud and AI keys found in public Gitee repos
Original title: 26,400 Valid Cloud and AI Credentials Found Exposed in Public Gitee Repositories
A scan of 7.25 million repositories kept only keys that still authenticated, led by 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs.
Researcher Ben Zimmermann reported on October 28 that 26,400 credentials left in public Gitee code still worked when tested. TruffleHog and Kingfisher scanned full commit histories, so keys later removed from current files could still count. He notified vendors holding the most keys but not the developers, and had not confirmed revocations when he published. Largest groups after Alibaba were YouTube, DeepSeek, Zhipu BigModel, and OpenAI keys.
Unconfirmed: He did not confirm revocations or third-party use, did not date the month-long scan, and did not name the enterprise platform behind one admin key.
- 12,242 credentials had 2025 commit dates; some dated to the late 2000s.
- TruffleHog validated 12,737 keys and Kingfisher 14,664, with 1,001 found by both.
- One credential was described as an active organization-admin key for an unnamed AI platform.
- Deleting or rewriting history does not revoke a key at the provider.
- Gitee's compared leak rate versus GitLab and Bitbucket is not conclusive, he wrote.
Impact: Working cloud and AI keys anyone could copy and use
- 1.Treat any key ever committed to a public Gitee repository as exposed and revoke it at the provider.
- 2.For Alibaba Cloud, issue a new AccessKey pair, switch apps, then disable and delete the old pair.
- 3.Rotate Google, YouTube, and OpenAI keys, then restrict APIs or set spend limits.
- Organizations
- Truffle SecurityMongoDB
- Countries
- China
From the original article
3 min read at thehackernews.com
26,400 credentials that developers left in public code on Gitee, a Chinese code-hosting service, still worked when a researcher tested them. Anyone who copied one from that code could have used it. Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann found them by scanning 7.
thehackernews.com
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