America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames

Security

I wonder what’s in ‘external-secret-repo-creds.yaml’ and ‘AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv’?

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) left open a GitHub repository named “Private-CISA” containing plain-text passwords, private keys, tokens, and secrets – with obvious file names like “external-secret-repo-creds.yaml” and “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” – for six months.

GitGuardian researcher Guillaume Valadon, fresh off a recent talk on Kubernetes secret leaks, found the public repository on May 14, and told The Register that he “quickly understood that the leak was bad and that time was running out. A national agency having 844 MB of production infrastructure material in a public GitHub repository for six months is as serious as a secrets leak gets.” 

Valadon, who previously spent nine years at France’s CISA equivalent, ANSSI, told us the leak included tokens for CISA’s internal JFrog Artifactory, Azure registry keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, Terraform infrastructure code, GitHub personal access tokens, and Entra ID SAML certificates.

GitGuardian reported the leaky repository to CISA on May 14, and the agency took it down a day later. 

A CISA spokesperson told The Register that it was aware of the report and is investigating. “Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident.”

It’s not a good look for the nation’s infosec agency, which hasn’t had a permanent boss since Trump took office,  is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets cuts on top of deep cuts to staff and funding last year, and has suffered its share of embarrassing security snafus in the interim.

In a Tuesday blog, Valadon said he initially thought the repo “was a hoax, given how suspicious the directory names (Backup-April-2026/, All Backups/, LZ-Artifactory/, Kubernetes-Important-Yaml-Files/, ENTRA ID – SAML Certificates/ …), file names (external-secret-repo-creds.yaml, CAWS GitHub Token.txt, Important AWS Tokens.txt, AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv, Kube-Config.txt …), and their contents (private keys, personal and professional GitHub tokens, AWS secrets, …) seemed too good to be true,” Valadon wrote.

It wasn’t a hoax  – “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation,”  but it was a “catalogue of unsafe practices,” he added, containing passwords stored in plain text, backups committed to Git, and an “explicit” how-to guide for disabling GitHub’s secret scanning.

After initially reporting the leak through the CERT/CC portal, and only receiving an auto-acknowledgement as of the morning of May 15  – a Friday  – Valadon alerted security journalist Brian Krebs about the publicly exposed secrets, which seemed to speed up CISA’s processes. By 6 pm EST that night, the feds took down the repository. 

Valadon told The Reg he gives CISA credit for quickly deleting the repository. “Most of our responsible disclosures take much longer, and many are never fixed,” he said. “Managing to take the repository offline in a day is impressive work.”

He doesn’t know if any other parties with less altruistic intentions found the secrets first, although the fact that the repository was never forked (based on public GitHub events) would seem to indicate that it wasn’t widely circulated on the dark web. 

“The only ones that can answer definitively is GitHub,” Valadon said. GitHub did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiry.

GitGuardian isn’t aware of any of the exposed credentials being abused by unauthorized individuals

“Each category of secret in the repository unlocks a specific attack path,” Valadon said. “Stacked together, they cover the full range: from destructive attacks and ransomware extortion to quiet, long-term persistence inside CISA’s build and deployment pipeline. That last scenario worried me the most, and it’s why I escalated through every channel we had until the repository was taken offline.”

Plus, the committer used both a CISA-issued contractor email and a personal Yahoo email across the same commits, and created the repository using a personal GitHub account. “That mixed-identity pattern is one of the hardest surfaces for security teams to cover, and it’s where the worst leaks happen,” Valadon said.®