Security News > 2024 > March > Over 12 million auth secrets and keys leaked on GitHub in 2023
GitHub users accidentally exposed 12.8 million authentication and sensitive secrets in over 3 million public repositories during 2023, with the vast majority remaining valid after five days.
In terms of which sectors leaked the most secrets, IT tops the list with the lion's share of 65.9%, followed by education with a notable 20.1%, and all others combined accounting for 14%. GitGuardian's generic detectors, which caught about 45% of all secrets the firm detected in 2023, are analyzed as follows.
The specific detectors that can identify and soft leaked secrets into more tangible categories indicate a massive exposure of Google API and Google Cloud keys, MongoDB credentials, OpenWeatherMap and Telegram bot tokens, MySQL and PostgreSQL credentials, and GitHub OAuth keys.
Generative AI tools continued their explosive growth in 2023, also reflected in the number of relevant secrets exposed on GitHub last year.
Last month, GitHub enabled push protection by default to prevent accidental exposure of secrets when pushing new code to the platform.
GitHub enables push protection by default to stop secrets leak.