Great job people, that's just cybersecurity 101
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jesus christ
This regime has caused so much damage to our national security, much of which we won't discover for years or decades. The Russians and Chinese (and literally anyone else) are probably fully infiltrated into our entire system in every aspect. SO fucking incompetent and corrupt.
Six months of exposure.
There is zero chance that the CISA systems have not been comprehensively breeched by every foreign adversary.
Good thing Trump cut 1/4 of their workforce last year. It's really paying dividends for Putin.
that chain saw is not at the correct height
It doesn't seem to have kickback brake, so it kinda is. It just should be running on full speed and hit something on the tip.
Breached? But we left the keys in the ignition and the door was wide open. We could have, you know, tried.
reminds me of when i lived in nashville and there had to be news bulletins reminding people to not leave firearms in their cars, as they were getting stolen.
Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn’t responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive.
But wait
Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories.
“Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature,” Valadon wrote in an email. “I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I’ve witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual’s mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices.”
One of the exposed files, titled “importantAWStokens,” included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers.
This is shameful incompetence. Just head-rolling abysmal incompetence. These are the people they hired, for all you 1337 hax0rz currently looking.
As a dev who’s been unemployed for 18 months your last sentence was pretty much my first thought when reading the article.
Outside of the sheer incompetence of this administration, is there ANY chance this was done intentionally as a honeypot or something along those lines?
The fact that the commits were explicit along with bypassing all the checks could read as someone trying to see who knocks on the door.
“Mistake”. Yeah, no. That’s someone thinking policies aren’t meant for them and blindly taking the easiest path. Sounds just like those 1337 hax0rs they gave the keys to
In a sane world this should get clearances revoked so they never again deal with any private data
ELIT please.
Explain like im Trump in case you didn't get the T bit. Sorry.
Our best and finest left the safe combo next to the safe and then left for 6 months.
Woke computer nerds fucked us
Edit: just to reassure the more anxious amongst us, I mean ‘woke’ in the maga sense of anything-i-don’t-like-is-woke. Not actually woke.
Actually woke computer nerds observe proper security protocols ffs.
Unfortunately you can’t ironically pretend to be a dumb asshole on the internet because you become indistinguishable from the actual dumb assholes
Beautiful, woke computer nerds, and they're gonna replace nuclear. My uncle, he was a nuclear woke, and he said, he said you know what, computers are the future, they're gonna replace nuclear. He dosen't have the socks for it, and the electronic wokes, they have these socks that just make the computer work for them, ok, the computer works for them. The computers will work for the nuclear.
GitHub gets autoscanned by thousands of malicious actors for keys and credentials on every commit, including the comments lol.
The fact that CISA themselves never saw an automated breach attempt only minutes after pushing to github is the more interesting story here.
Either the contractor is so incompetent that they didn't have any logging set up and the breach went completely unnoticed for 6 months.
Or this really is some fat honeypot that they won't admit is a honeypot because they've been using it to watch or bait APTs.
Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident
This is literally impossible unless it really was a honeypot. You can demo this yourself in real time. Make a throwaway cloud account on your favorite provider, commit the cloud auth token into a repo, and you will see an automated bot login within minutes.
Commiting any secrets to a public repo should just be considered auto compromised because of how potent it is.
That stuff ususlly gets exposed via poor CI/CD permissions where credentials are required, but straight up file commit is like publicly announcing exactly where you left your house keys lol.
Can confirm, with one of my first discord bots I accidentally committed the token and within a day someone logged in and announced in every server it was in that the token was compromised
Straight up file committing is like making a copy of your house keys for anyone who can see you at that moment and all moments thereafter lol
Here's a link to the Krebs on Security article that Gizmodo used as a source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/05/cisa-admin-leaked-aws-govcloud-keys-on-github/
Imagine fucking up so bad security researchers think it must be an obvious honey pot until they see what the credentials give access to
This isnt a leak. This is incompetency.
vibe code go brrrrrrr
EDIT: wow it's far worse, it was a single contractor that decided that his convenience was above any and all security recommendations ever written. Pure. Genius!
Only the best people
Contractor, eh?
How much do you wanna bet he has close personal ties to the trump family and zero cybersecurity experience?
Leaving passwords in plaintext has zero to do with “vibe coding”
Why are people acting surprised? This is exactly what DOGE intended to do.
This is like being surprised someone died in a fatal car accident after their wheel came off on the highway because they handed a wheel and lug nuts to a 10 year old and said "put this on"
Is this the same cybersecurity agency that fired all its professionals to replace them with sycophants?
Passwords were stored as plain text in a public GitHub repository.
Governments and corporations are made up of people, and when people see other people treated like garbage, they tend to become less diligent in their own duties, and loyalty is thrown out the window. Revenge is never off the table.
Also, even if you get rid of everybody so that no witnesses of your injustice remain, you've filled those positions with neophytes, who are incompetent for quite some time (at least).
that's the notorious "double whammy catch-22 fuck around find out" phenomenon, a TRIPLE THREAT
Its dumb shit like this that reassures me that AI will definitely take over cyber security jobs and make shit even LESS secure than everything already is.
that's, uh... that's bad, right?
I'm surprised whatever software the keys were for didn't detect this and deactivate the keys. Discord did this automatically when I pushed a file to github that had a bot login token in it. Apparently Discord constantly scans github for such things, or maybe github does and sends Discord a msg, I dunno. But it was amazingly fast, like within 2 minutes.
that feature was probably deactivated, just like the feature on github which prevents uploading of SSH keys that had been explicitly disabled
And, when mainstream media periodically interviews republican congressmen who happen to be opposed to the Trump admin’s latest corruption/idiocy, why the hell do they never ask “Since you’re against these illegal/irresponsible actions… what the flying F are you gonna do about it?”
U.S. Cybersecurity Agency == Chat_gipity_techno_turds or short version doge_after_birth... like top jorb in the land man...or should be. Always running from or running to. Constipation or diarrhea
Fast. Cheap. Good.
At best, pick 2.
This applies to code and coders as well, despite management's inability to comprehend reality.
Honeypot?
A container of sweet stuff that you get stuck in.
Basically, a system full of juicy looking data that takes forever to collect and process... And then it was all fake data the whole time.
Plus, you can hide some real info, like the name of the machine compromised, or info about the attacker's system in the data, and then when it gets compromised, sold on the black market, and eventually published, you can reference the leaked data to see exactly which system the hackers got into, and get some insights on how they did it.
...but remember, everything needs to be written in memory safe languages to stop security breaches.
Passwords were a mistake.
What are the odds this was AI related vs some underpaid intern
This was a dev who wanted to sync data between their home and work computers so they could do check-ins from home. This is a combination of a lazy person who values their own ease of use over basic security practices, plus a government contractor who values making as much money as possible by paying shitty devs without any real oversight over those shitty devs, plus an oversight government entity that had its funding slashed by people who only understand cutting money as opposed to national security.
I’m sure that will be an excuse but no, this was lazy-ass we-dont-wanna incompetent garbage devs.
Odds are neither and it’s a “plausibly deniable” attack.
If (and I quote) the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness are a fucking plain text .csv file then... then yeah... it's on par with the rest of the administration.
It's a mistery how nobody has (yet) stolen their nuclear keys and detonated a nuke in the middle of magastan.
Are we sure this administration doesn't want that so he can play hero for his legacy building? He's obviously trying to cement with all the projects he's doing.
They would target blue states, magastan is self destructive and foreign adversaries know it. Plenty of corrupt deals to be made while the sell off continues.
No no no, it was on purpose it totally TROLLED the LIBS epicly by leaking le critical national security secrets and endangering the public XD /s
Well when you fire all the competent people or demoralize them so much that they quit, this kind of bullshit is what you're left with.
my only consolation is that Russia eventually recovered from the post fall era where CIA and friends were literally in the building cataloging the contents of the Soviet intelligence agency. Eventually so will we I suppose



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