Leaked in 2022, Still Root in 2026

If you committed an AWS key to a public repo in 2022, here is the bad news: it probably still works. Truffle Security re-verified 10,616 publicly exposed AWS keys that had surfaced over the previous four years — in git history, Docker images, CI logs, and public datasets — and 88% of them still authenticated as of August 10, 2026. The numbers get more interesting in the corporate subset. Of the live keys, 768 give full control of a company's AWS account: 526 are root keys, 242 are IAM users carrying AdministratorAccess. Root is the scary one, because a root key can't be scoped down. In Truffle's words, it is the account, including the ability to close it. The median leaked key in the study is five years old. Five years. And most of them were never rotated.

Where the keys come from matters. Truffle's scanners found 431,875 public findings resolving to 64,024 unique verified keys across 50,654 accounts, and the single largest source was not a git repository. It was Hugging Face: 8,482 live keys across 3,394 public datasets, with 17.9% of them root — the highest root share of any source they track. Those datasets are mostly snapshots of public code repackaged for training, which means a key that leaked once gets tokenized into corpora that thousands of downstream projects download. The AI data pipeline has quietly become a credential vault with a five-year shelf life, and nobody in the chain has a job description that says check. There is a cost column, too: in July alone, leaked live keys racked up $420,631 in AWS spend, and only 262 of the 2,754 accounts Truffle could read had a budget alert set. Accounts don't die quietly in the cloud. They bill.

Source article image
Source image 1

Every credential checklist says rotate your secrets, and that advice is technically correct and operationally hollow, because rotation is a process and processes run on the assumption that someone knows the secret leaked. That is the part that isn't true. These keys were not stolen, phished, or breached. They were public, searchable, and sitting there for years. What is missing is a feedback loop: a reason for a five-year-old key to get audited at all. Truffle's own recommendations are sound — delete root keys, audit IAM credentials by age, rotate what you find, set budget alerts, and treat any committed credential as compromised. One asterisk is worth flagging: the research shipped alongside the launch of their TruffleHog AWS Analyze scanner, so vendor research is advertising

Source article image
Source image 2
in a lab coat, and you should read the numbers with that in mind. But the core claim is one any team can check against its own accounts. So here is the uncomfortable question: when your team finds a key that was committed to a repo in 2022, what does your rotation story sound like? "We rotate when we find out" is not a control. It's a confession.

Sources

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI Is Starting to Feel Less Like a Gadget and More Like Infrastructure

Image
Modern AI doesn't replace infrastructure — it runs on top of it. (Photo: Unsplash) For a while, AI coverage had the energy of a mall demo kiosk: very shiny, slightly chaotic, and usually one prompt away from embarrassment. Lately, though, the more interesting story is less about flashy demos and more about infrastructure. A useful CNBC piece argued that AI is not simply going to vaporize enterprise software overnight, and that sounds about right. In real companies, software does not disappear just because a model can summarize a meeting or write a decent SQL query. What actually happens is messier and more practical: AI starts sneaking into the plumbing. It shows up in search, support workflows, procurement tools, analytics dashboards, and data pipelines. The real winners may not be the loudest chatbot wrappers, but the vendors that make enterprise systems easier to operate, easier to query, and slightly less soul-crushing for the humans trapped inside them. That is less cinematic ...
Read more

When Two AI Bots Finally Learned to Talk in Discord

I spent part of the day doing something that sounds like the setup for a bad joke: getting two local AI assistants to talk to each other in the same Discord channel. Not through a web UI. Not by bouncing prompts manually between windows like a human message queue. In the actual shared channel, where both could see the conversation and react to each other. The funny part is that the problem was not intelligence. It was manners. Both bots were defensive by default around bot-authored messages, which is the sensible setting if you do not want your infrastructure turning into a recursive support group. The downside is obvious: if both assistants treat other bots as suspicious background noise, they will never coordinate on anything more useful than silence. The fix was to make both sides accept bot-authored messages only when they were explicitly mentioned. That detail matters more than it sounds. Blanket bot acceptance is how you end up with two enthusiastic systems discovering each oth...
Read more

A CISA Contractor's GitHub Repo Held 844 MB of Secrets — and No One Closed the Door

Image
There is something almost poetic about the US government's premier cybersecurity agency — the one whose job is literally to plug holes in critical infrastructure — getting outsmarted by a contractor who treated a public GitHub repository like a digital junk drawer. The "Private-CISA" repo, created November 13, 2025, sat publicly for six months containing 844 megabytes of plaintext passwords, AWS GovCloud administrative credentials, Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, Terraform infrastructure code, CI/CD build logs, and internal deployment documentation. Guillaume Valadon at GitGuardian flagged it on May 14 after his automated scanning picked up the exposure. The commit history told the whole story in plain sight: the account owner had explicitly disabled GitHub's default secret-scanning protections, pushed plaintext credentials stored in CSV files, committed full backup archives into git history, and used easily guessed passwords like "platform-name-2...
Read more