Technology

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.