this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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[–] Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 hours ago

We could just burn everything down and return to jungle law where the fascists will realize really quick how coddled they’ve been in life

[–] Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 9 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Passwords were stored as plain text in a public GitHub repository.

Governments and corporations are made up of people, and when people see other people treated like garbage, they tend to become less diligent in their own duties, and loyalty is thrown out the window. Revenge is never off the table.

Also, even if you get rid of everybody so that no witnesses of your injustice remain, you've filled those positions with neophytes, who are incompetent for quite some time (at least).

that's the notorious "double whammy catch-22 fuck around find out" phenomenon, a TRIPLE THREAT

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

This isnt a leak. This is incompetency.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 3 hours ago

"Store gets robbed after owner leaves door wide open at night"

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 66 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (3 children)

GitHub gets autoscanned by thousands of malicious actors for keys and credentials on every commit, including the comments lol.

The fact that CISA themselves never saw an automated breach attempt only minutes after pushing to github is the more interesting story here.

Either the contractor is so incompetent that they didn't have any logging set up and the breach went completely unnoticed for 6 months.

Or this really is some fat honeypot that they won't admit is a honeypot because they've been using it to watch or bait APTs.

Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident

This is literally impossible unless it really was a honeypot. You can demo this yourself in real time. Make a throwaway cloud account on your favorite provider, commit the cloud auth token into a repo, and you will see an automated bot login within minutes.

Commiting any secrets to a public repo should just be considered auto compromised because of how potent it is.

That stuff ususlly gets exposed via poor CI/CD permissions where credentials are required, but straight up file commit is like publicly announcing exactly where you left your house keys lol.

[–] Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world 17 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Can confirm, with one of my first discord bots I accidentally committed the token and within a day someone logged in and announced in every server it was in that the token was compromised

[–] Taldan@lemmy.world 13 points 4 hours ago

Based greyhat

[–] trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf 7 points 9 hours ago

My first thought was that sounds intentional..

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Straight up file committing is like making a copy of your house keys for anyone who can see you at that moment and all moments thereafter lol

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 8 points 8 hours ago
[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 62 points 13 hours ago

Imagine fucking up so bad security researchers think it must be an obvious honey pot until they see what the credentials give access to

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 181 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Six months of exposure.

There is zero chance that the CISA systems have not been comprehensively breeched by every foreign adversary.

Good thing Trump cut 1/4 of their workforce last year. It's really paying dividends for Putin.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 77 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] mPony@lemmy.world 24 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

that chain saw is not at the correct height

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 6 points 12 hours ago

It's only...what, about half a metre too high ?

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 23 points 15 hours ago

All going to plan, comrade

[–] henfredemars@lemdro.id 16 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Breached? But we left the keys in the ignition and the door was wide open. We could have, you know, tried.

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 11 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

reminds me of when i lived in nashville and there had to be news bulletins reminding people to not leave firearms in their cars, as they were getting stolen.

[–] MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

For a moment, I chose to imagine the danger was that your unattended firearm would steal your unattended car.

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

that’s a new model s&w lol.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 26 points 12 hours ago

Is this the same cybersecurity agency that fired all its professionals to replace them with sycophants?

[–] zd9@lemmy.world 101 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

jesus christ

This regime has caused so much damage to our national security, much of which we won't discover for years or decades. The Russians and Chinese (and literally anyone else) are probably fully infiltrated into our entire system in every aspect. SO fucking incompetent and corrupt.

[–] henfredemars@lemdro.id 39 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (3 children)

We’re barely even trying with the massive cuts to cyber security. It’s almost the exact playbook you would use if leadership were actively hostile.

[–] zd9@lemmy.world 42 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Trump and co are actively hostile to the US government though. There have been entire books written about how compromised he is. He's the perfect insider threat example: in debt to foreign powers, selfish and looking to make personal money, lies about his dealings, easily temptable with honeypot women (and Epstein girls, fucking sick), no allegiance or any form of duty to country or anything bigger than himself because he's a massive nihilist narcissist.

Really really scary times for anyone in America.

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 15 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Don't worry, soon the folks in charge will come to the inevitable conclusion that the government systems are all compromised, so clearly the only solution is to privatise them and have thevNSA run by Palantir.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 15 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

See, that's the thing. I always grew up with the phrase "Don't blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence".

But at a certain point, IS it incompetence anymore??? At this point it's starting to feel very very deliberate.

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 8 points 13 hours ago

In this case it is both malice and incompetence acting together to create the worst possible outcomes.

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[–] demonsword@lemmy.world 187 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

vibe code go brrrrrrr

EDIT: wow it's far worse, it was a single contractor that decided that his convenience was above any and all security recommendations ever written. Pure. Genius!

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 15 points 12 hours ago

Contractor, eh?

How much do you wanna bet he has close personal ties to the trump family and zero cybersecurity experience?

[–] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 60 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Leaving passwords in plaintext has zero to do with “vibe coding”

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 71 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It definitely can if an LLM did it.

[–] wucking_feardo@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

I agree and to expand the same point. Even if the llm didn't do it, it's entirely plausible the LLM recommended it and the dev just drank that coolaid

[–] demonsword@lemmy.world 24 points 16 hours ago

yeah, and this is why I edited my original post after reading the article.

[–] crusa187@lemmy.ml 38 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 3 points 9 hours ago

You know what's ironic? FedRAMP rules dictate that Thou Must Scan Thy Repos for Secrets (tokens, passwords, etc)

GitHub, ButrBucket, etc all have this out of the box for enterprise customers

https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-data-center/kb/how-to-scan-for-and-remove-passwords-or-secrets-in-bitbucket-server-repositories/

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 83 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (9 children)

Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn’t responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive.

But wait

Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories.

“Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature,” Valadon wrote in an email. “I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I’ve witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual’s mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices.”

One of the exposed files, titled “importantAWStokens,” included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers.

This is shameful incompetence. Just head-rolling abysmal incompetence. These are the people they hired, for all you 1337 hax0rz currently looking.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

“Mistake”. Yeah, no. That’s someone thinking policies aren’t meant for them and blindly taking the easiest path. Sounds just like those 1337 hax0rs they gave the keys to

In a sane world this should get clearances revoked so they never again deal with any private data

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 42 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

As a dev who’s been unemployed for 18 months your last sentence was pretty much my first thought when reading the article.

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[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Outside of the sheer incompetence of this administration, is there ANY chance this was done intentionally as a honeypot or something along those lines?

The fact that the commits were explicit along with bypassing all the checks could read as someone trying to see who knocks on the door.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 12 points 13 hours ago

I don’t see it. Like the guy in the article said, it starts out looking like a joke . . . Buuuut it ain’t.

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[–] boatswain@infosec.pub 78 points 16 hours ago

Here's a link to the Krebs on Security article that Gizmodo used as a source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/05/cisa-admin-leaked-aws-govcloud-keys-on-github/

[–] dhork@lemmy.world 31 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Why are people acting surprised? This is exactly what DOGE intended to do.

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[–] db2@lemmy.world 35 points 17 hours ago (2 children)
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[–] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 28 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Its dumb shit like this that reassures me that AI will definitely take over cyber security jobs and make shit even LESS secure than everything already is.

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[–] tomiant@piefed.social 11 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Wow. Wowowowowowowowow. Wow.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm surprised whatever software the keys were for didn't detect this and deactivate the keys. Discord did this automatically when I pushed a file to github that had a bot login token in it. Apparently Discord constantly scans github for such things, or maybe github does and sends Discord a msg, I dunno. But it was amazingly fast, like within 2 minutes.

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