Ben Zimmermann finds 26,400 live cloud and AI keys on Gitee

The scale of the find comes from how the scan was run: rather than checking only current files, Zimmermann ran two open-source scanners across the full commit history of 7.25 million public repositories, which is how credentials that were deleted from view but never revoked could still surface. TruffleHog and Kingfisher each flagged different sets — 12,737 and 14,664 working credentials respectively — and the combined 26,400 were confirmed to still work against the issuing services.

The timing is notable. By commit date, 12,242 of the credentials came from 2025, nearly half the total, which suggests the practice of committing keys to public repos is ongoing rather than a legacy problem. Zimmermann also found an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform, which he left unnamed.

The disclosure gap is the part that matters for anyone using these services. Vendors with the most exposed keys received a list of their credentials, but the developers who leaked them were not contacted, and no revocations had been confirmed at publication. Zimmermann's advice to developers is unqualified: treat any key that has ever been in a public Gitee repository as exposed, and revoke it at the provider.