26,400 working cloud and AI keys found exposed in public Gitee repositories

An independent researcher found 26,400 unique working cloud and AI credentials exposed in public repositories on Gitee, a China-based code hosting platform, according to The Hacker News on October 29, 2026. The findings underscore a persistent problem: secrets committed to public code repositories remain usable long after developers believe they have cleaned them up.

What happened

The Hacker News reported that researcher Ben Zimmermann scanned 7.25 million public Gitee repositories, including their full commit histories, and published the results on October 28. Keys that developers later deleted from code were still counted, because they survive in commit history. Each credential was counted once regardless of how many repositories contained it, and the article said only working credentials were kept after testing against their issuing services. Commit dates showed 12,242 of the credentials came from 2025, with some dating back to the late 2000s.

Technical details

According to the report, the scan used two secret-detection tools: TruffleHog, from Truffle Security, and Kingfisher, from MongoDB, with the Kingfisher team helping develop the write-up. TruffleHog found 12,737 working credentials and Kingfisher found 14,664, with only 1,001 found by both, illustrating how detection coverage varies by tool; the article noted TruffleHog has no detector for Zhipu keys. By type, the largest buckets were Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs (9,473), YouTube API keys (3,805), DeepSeek keys (3,170), Zhipu BigModel keys (1,489) and OpenAI keys (1,348), with smaller numbers for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud and Google Gemini. The report also cited one "active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform," which it left unnamed. Gitee showed 3.64 working credentials per 1,000 repositories, compared with earlier TruffleHog-only figures of 3.11 for GitLab and 2.39 for Bitbucket, though the article cautioned the numbers are not directly comparable.

Who is affected

Any organization or developer whose cloud or AI keys have ever appeared in a public Gitee repository is potentially exposed. The report said that when it published, Zimmermann had not confirmed whether any of the credentials were revoked; he sent lists to the vendors with the most exposed keys but did not contact the individual developers, and the article did not say whether anyone had abused the keys.

What to do

The Hacker News relayed concrete remediation advice. Treat any key that has ever been in a public Gitee repository as exposed, because deleting it or rewriting history does not revoke it. For Alibaba Cloud, create a new AccessKey pair, migrate applications, then disable and delete the old one, check for unexpected charges and unauthorized resource changes, and review ActionTrail logs for the last 90 days plus service-specific logs. For Google and YouTube keys, rotate the key, update applications, delete the old key and add API restrictions. For OpenAI keys, rotate immediately and set spend limits. More broadly, teams should scan their own repositories for secrets before publishing and move credentials into dedicated secret managers.