Ethical Hacking News
26,400 valid cloud and AI credentials have been exposed in public Gitee repositories, raising concerns about security and data exposure. The largest groups of exposed credentials belonged to YouTube API keys, DeepSeek keys, and OpenAI keys. Experts advise treating these credentials as exposed and revoking them at the provider. The discovery highlights the need for better security measures and vigilance in the use of public code repositories.
26,400 valid cloud and AI credentials were exposed in public Gitee repositories. The majority of the credentials belonged to cloud and AI services, with 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs being the most exposed. 12,242 of the credentials came from 2025, nearly half of the total. The largest groups of exposed credentials belonged to YouTube API keys, DeepSeek keys, Zhipu's BigModel AI platform, and OpenAI keys. A compromised key can cause data loss, unexpected charges, and interrupted API access. Treating any key that has ever been in a public Gitee repository as exposed and revoking it is recommended.
The recent discovery of 26,400 valid cloud and AI credentials exposed in public Gitee repositories has sent shockwaves throughout the cybersecurity community. According to independent researcher Ben Zimmermann, these credentials were found by scanning 7.25 million public Gitee repositories. The majority of these credentials belonged to cloud and AI services, with 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs being the most exposed.
Zimmermann used two secret scanners, TruffleHog and Kingfisher, to run across every repository. Both scanners read each repository's full commit history and kept only those that worked. The 26,400 figure counts each credential once, regardless of how many repositories it appeared in. Interestingly, 12,242 of the credentials came from 2025, nearly half of the total. Some dated to the late 2000s.
The largest groups of exposed credentials belonged to YouTube API keys, DeepSeek keys, Zhipu's BigModel AI platform, and OpenAI keys. Smaller numbers were found for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud, and Google's Gemini. One of the credentials was "an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform," Zimmermann wrote. He did not name the platform or say what the credential could reach.
What a working key lets someone do depends on the service. OpenAI says that a compromised key allows another person to use the account's quota without the owner's consent. That can cause "data loss, unexpected charges," a used-up monthly quota, and interrupted API access. A YouTube API key is a Google Cloud API key that identifies a project. Without API restrictions, such a key can be used with every API that accepts Google Cloud keys.
Treat any key that has ever been in a public Gitee repository as exposed, and revoke it at the provider. Deleting a key from the code or rewriting the repository's history does not revoke it. Alibaba Cloud advises creating a new AccessKey pair, switching apps to it, then disabling and deleting the old pair. Google and YouTube API keys advise rotating the key, which creates a new key with the same restrictions, updating apps to use it, then deleting the old key. OpenAI advises rotating the key immediately from the API Keys page and setting spend limits to help limit charges from a leaked key.
The scan ran for about a month, but Zimmermann did not provide the dates, so it is unclear how long ago the credentials were tested. He also did not say whether anyone else had used them. Zimmermann developed his post with Kingfisher's team. In this scan, TruffleHog found almost all of the Alibaba Cloud keys. Kingfisher found all 1,489 BigModel keys, because TruffleHog has no detector for Zhipu's keys.
Gitee's public API is limited, and a 2021 attempt to study leaked credentials on the site gave up because of it. Gitee's rate, 3.64 working credentials per 1,000 repositories scanned, is higher than the rates from earlier scans of GitLab (3.11) and Bitbucket (2.39). Those scans used only TruffleHog, Zimmermann wrote. Based on TruffleHog's results alone, Gitee's rate is 1.76, but that count excludes services TruffleHog does not cover, such as Zhipu. So neither figure shows which platform leaks more.
Related Information:
https://www.ethicalhackingnews.com/articles/26400-Cloud-and-AI-Credentials-Exposed-in-Public-Gitee-Repositories-ehn.shtml
https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/26400-valid-cloud-and-ai-credentials.html
https://www.b3ncloud.net/article/45535
Published: Thu Oct 29 08:12:32 2026 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
