26,400 Valid Cloud and AI Credentials Found Exposed in Public Gitee Repositories

A researcher discovered 26,400 exposed credentials in public code on Gitee, a Chinese code-hosting service, and found that they were still valid. These credentials were left in the code by developers and could have been used by anyone who copied them. The researcher, Ben Zimmermann, found the exposed credentials by scanning 7.25 million public Gitee repositories. The majority of the exposed credentials were keys for cloud and AI services. The discovery was reported on October 28. The exposed credentials could have been exploited by anyone who accessed the public code.