GoKawiilResearcher finds 26,400 live credentials across 7.25M Gitee repositories
Security researcher Ben Zimmermann, working with MongoDB's Kingfisher team, scanned over 7.2 million public repositories on Gitee, China's national open-source code hosting platform, using TruffleHog and Kingfisher. The scan uncovered 26,400 unique verified-live credentials, including an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform and thousands of live cloud provider access keys.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The findings suggest that Gitee's restrictive public API, which previously deterred large-scale research in 2021, has left a major code-hosting platform relatively unexamined for credential leaks compared to GitHub or GitLab. This could indicate a significant and largely unmonitored attack surface for enterprises and developers using Gitee, especially given the platform's lack of vendor-backed secret-scanning tools.
- 26,400 live, verified credentials were found across 7.25 million Gitee repositories.
- Exposed secrets included an org-admin credential for a major AI platform and numerous cloud access keys.
- Gitee's limited public API previously blocked similar research, suggesting it may remain an underexamined risk area.
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Published there as: “26,400 live credentials found scanning 7.25M repos on China's Gitee”
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