Who's watching private repos turn public? We leaked 75 AWS keys to find out - Codatus
codatus.com
We made 75 GitHub repos public on a timer and logged who came. The internet finds a public repo in 6 minutes, and without enterprise tools, you'd never know it flipped.

Live AWS keys in 75 throwaway repos, each made public for one of five windows from 60 seconds to 12 hours, every use logged. The keys were tripwires; the real question was who notices a private repo going public, and what they do once they’re in.

The most useful finding is the dull one: re-hiding the repo does nothing. One busy harvester kept re-validating the captured keys for a day after the repos went private again. Only rotating the key stops it.

This came out of building a monitor for exactly these repo-setting changes.

  • peternovakdev@programming.devOP
    1·
    5 days ago

    That matches what I saw. One of the actors was a Hetzner host running TruffleHog, and the busiest was a harvester on two OVH IPs doing nothing but GetCallerIdentity checks. So yes, someone is polling the public events feed and scanning whatever shows up. The keys got found the moment the repo was visible to that feed.