Threat Intelligence

Over 26,000 Working Cloud and AI Keys Found Sitting in Public Code on Gitee

The Hacker News · 29 Oct 2026

Key Takeaway If a key has ever been pushed to a public code repository, treat it as compromised and revoke it immediately, because deleting it from the code does not remove it from the history.

Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann scanned 7.25 million public repositories on Gitee, a Chinese code-hosting service, and found 26,400 credentials that still worked when tested. Anyone who copied one from the code could have used it. Most were keys for cloud and AI services, led by 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs. Others included 3,805 YouTube API keys, 3,170 DeepSeek keys, 1,489 Zhipu BigModel keys and 1,348 OpenAI keys, with smaller numbers for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud and Gemini. One was an active organisation-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform, though the platform was not named.

The scanners, TruffleHog and Kingfisher, checked each credential against the service that issued it and kept only those that worked. They also read each repository's full commit history, so a key a developer later deleted could still be found. Nearly half the credentials, 12,242, dated from 2025, while some went back to the late 2000s. Zimmermann told the vendors with the most exposed keys but did not contact the developers, and he had not confirmed that any keys were revoked when he published. It is also unclear when the tests ran or whether anyone else used the keys.

The risk depends on the service. OpenAI says a compromised key lets another person use the account's quota without consent, which can mean data loss, unexpected charges, a used-up monthly quota and interrupted access. Google says a YouTube API key, without API restrictions, can be used with every API that accepts Google Cloud keys.

credential exposure cloud security AI security API keys

Summarised by CISO AI from The Hacker News, written with Claude Sonnet 5.5. We link back to every original so you can read it yourself.