this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Programming

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We made 75 private repos public on a timer. The internet noticed in 6 minutes. (codatus.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by peternovakdev@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 12 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

It’s really not surprising that it’s so fast, since you can easily get newly created repos and repos made public from a github API (the “list public events” one at /events). Makes sense that people are polling this and feeding it to TruffleHog.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago

I guess the rather consistent 6 minutes don't come from it actually taking so long but rather from some kind of caching that only makes these repos show up after 5 minutes plus 1 minute for fetching and using the api key.