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Gitee repos hold 26,400 valid cloud and AI keys, researcher reports

A researcher reports 26,400 working cloud and AI keys in public Gitee repos, so revoke and rotate any key you ever pushed there.

Published
Exploitation
Unknown, the researcher did not say whether anyone else used the credentials, according to The Hacker News

What happened

Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann reports that he found 26,400 credentials in public Gitee repositories that still worked when he tested them, The Hacker News says. According to the outlet, he scanned 7.25 million public Gitee repositories and published his results on October 28. Most were keys for cloud and AI services. The largest group was 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs.

The Hacker News reports these further details from the research:

  • Zimmermann ran two secret scanners, TruffleHog and Kingfisher, over every repository. Both checked each credential against the issuing service and kept only those that worked. The Hacker News
  • The scanners read each repository’s full commit history. A key that a developer later removed from the code could still be found and counted. The Hacker News
  • Each credential is counted once, however many repositories it appeared in. By commit date, 12,242 of them came from 2025. Some dated to the late 2000s. The Hacker News
  • After the Alibaba Cloud keys, the largest groups were 3,805 YouTube API keys, 3,170 DeepSeek keys, 1,489 Zhipu BigModel keys and 1,348 OpenAI keys. Smaller numbers were found for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud and Gemini. The Hacker News
  • Zimmermann says one credential was “an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform”. He did not name the platform or say what it could reach. The Hacker News
  • He sent the vendors with the most exposed keys a list of their credentials. He did not contact the developers who leaked them. The Hacker News
  • TruffleHog found 12,737 working credentials and Kingfisher found 14,664, but only 1,001 were found by both. Kingfisher found all the BigModel keys because TruffleHog has no detector for Zhipu keys. Kingfisher is made by MongoDB, and the post was developed with its Kingfisher team. The Hacker News

What is not confirmed:

  • Whether any reported credential has been revoked. Zimmermann had not confirmed any revocation when he published.
  • When the credentials were tested. The scan ran for about a month, but no dates were given.
  • Whether anyone else used the keys.
  • Any response from Gitee or the affected vendors.

All of the above is according to The Hacker News. No other independent outlet is in the sources.

Am I affected?

You may be affected if a credential has ever been committed to a public Gitee repository, even if it was later deleted. The Hacker News notes that the scanners read full commit history. It also reports Truffle Security’s point that deleting a key or rewriting history does not revoke it (The Hacker News).

The impact depends on the service. According to the outlet:

  • OpenAI says a compromised key lets another person use the account’s quota. That can cause “data loss, unexpected charges”, a used-up monthly quota and interrupted API access.
  • Google says a YouTube API key is a Google Cloud API key. Without API restrictions it can be used with every API that accepts Google Cloud keys.

Sources for both points: The Hacker News.

What to do now

  1. Treat any key that has ever been in a public Gitee repository as exposed, and revoke it at the provider. Removing it from code is not enough (The Hacker News).
  2. Alibaba Cloud: create a new AccessKey pair, switch your apps to it, then disable and delete the old pair. Check for unexpected charges and for resources created or deleted that you did not need. ActionTrail shows the key’s API calls for the last 90 days. Data operations in services such as OSS and SLS must be checked in each service’s own logs (The Hacker News).
  3. Google and YouTube API keys: rotate the key, update your apps to use the new one, then delete the old key. Add API restrictions so the key works only with the APIs you need (The Hacker News).
  4. OpenAI: rotate the key from the API Keys page and set spend limits (The Hacker News).
  5. If you rely on one secret scanner, check that its detectors cover the services you use. In this scan, each tool alone found about half of the total (The Hacker News).

Sources