Public GitLab repositories exposed more than 17,000 secrets

Wiz

After scanning all 5.6 million public repositories on GitLab Cloud, a security engineer discovered more than 17,000 exposed secrets across over 2,800unique domains.

Luke Marshallused the TruffleHogopen-source tool to check the code in the repositories forsensitive credentials like API keys, passwords, and tokens.

The researcherpreviously scanned Bitbucket, where he found 6,212 secretsspread over 2.6 million repositories. He also checked the Common Crawl datasetthat is used to train AI models, which exposed 12,000 valid secrets.

Wizdescribes Marshall.

“This setup allowed me to complete the scan of 5,600,000 repositories in just over 24 hours.”

The total cost for the entire public GitLab Cloud repositories using the above method was $770.

The researcher found 17,430 verified live secrets, nearly three times as many as in Bitbucket, and with a 35% higher secret density (secrets per repository), too.

Historical data shows that most leaked secrets are newer than 2018. However, Marshall also found some very older secrets dating from 2009, which are still valid today.

Volume of exposed secrets
Types of exposed secrets on GitLab

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Bill Toulas

Bill Toulas is a tech writer and infosec news reporter with over a decade of experience working on various online publications, covering open-source, Linux, malware, data breach incidents, and hacks.

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