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Developer posts secret key on GitHub, loses $40K in 2 minutes (cointelegraph.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

78 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Web3 developer Brian Guan lost $40,000 after accidentally posting his wallet's secret keys publicly on GitHub, with the funds being drained in just two minutes.
The crypto community's reactions were mixed, with some offering support and others mocking Guan's previous comments about developers using AI tools like ChatGPT for coding.
This incident highlights ongoing debates about security practices and the role of AI in software development within the crypto community.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 5 months ago (4 children)

It must be automated for it to happen in 2 minutes. Which implies these kind of things happen often enough for someone to write a script for it.

[–] [email protected] 91 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, it absolutely is automated.

There are bots running constantly looking for things that match patterns for exploitable credentials in public commits.

AWS credentials

SSH keys

Crypto wallets

Bank card info

If you push secrets to a public github repo, they will be exploited almost immediately.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The scanning part is definitely automated by many different actors (for the gains or the "lulz"), but being this fast, also automated key usage (account draining) must have been implemented which is a bit more impressive...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Not really. All of the underlying mechanics of crypto are so simple that they can be very easily interacted with by bots. Bots make up the vast majority of all crypto trades; mostly wash trading, but also front-running attacks, scams or outright thefts like this one. There are so many exploitable flaws in crypto that every bug is basically a self-executing bug bounty.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

If it was a script I wrote, it would have successfully stolen the $40k, but also stolen my own money and deposit both sets of money into a second intended victims account because I forgot to clear a variable before the main loop runs again.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

You always mess up some mundane detail!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

It would have deposited the funds in an account "foobar123" and been lost forever

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Might have happened in this case too, you never know.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

Oh yes absolutely, there are bots constantly crawling any open source code. A friend of mine accidentally leaked their discord API key, nuked a whole server within minutes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

There must be bots trolling GitHub for API keys, crypto secret keys, and other such valuable data