CISA Exposes Secrets, Credentials in 'Private' Repo

CYBERSECURITY OPERATIONS CYBER RISK APPLICATION SECURITY СLOUD SECURITY NEWS CISA Exposes Secrets, Credentials in 'Private' Repo The agency's GitHub repository, publicly available since November 2025, was ironically named "Private-CISA." Rob Wright,Senior News Director,Dark Reading May 19, 2026 3 Min Read SOURCE: PJ MCDONNELL VIA ALAMY STOCK PHOTO It seems every organization is exposing secrets on the Internet these days — even the US government. GitGuardian researcher Guillaume Valadon today revealed he discovered a public GitHub repository belonging to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that contained 844MB of sensitive data, including plain-text passwords, authentication tokens, and other secrets. Despite being named "Private-CISA," the repo was publicly accessible online since Nov. 13, 2025. In a blog post, Valadon said he first discovered the exposed repo May 14 after GitGuardian's Public Monitoring, which continuously scans public sources like GitHub for leaked secrets, flagged the repository the day before. After taking a peek, he first suspected it was a hoax because the contents of repo "seemed too good to be true." Alas, the repo was real, and so were the secrets contained inside. CISA's blunder marks the latest example of an unfortunate trend — organizations failing to contain the sprawl of secrets and accidentally exposing sensitive datasets on the Internet, where eager threat actors stand ready to sweep them up. Related:Looking Back, Looking Forward: Digesting a Dynamic Bouillabaisse of Cyber Evolution Attackers Gain 'Detailed View Into Cloud Infrastructure'  Valadon found the repo contained some eye-popping directory names and file names, including "Important AWS Tokens.txt" and "ENTRA ID - SAML Certificates/". In fact, the repo contained not only those tokens and SAML certificates but plain-text passwords, private keys, and other credentials, some of which were still valid. Additionally, the repo housed CI/CD build logs, deployment workflow documentation, Kubernetes manifests, GitHub Actions workflows, GitHub organization automation, and a host of AWS data, such as user accounts, identity and access management (IAM) data, service accounts, and secret-management paths, among other items. "The exposed material provided a detailed view into cloud infrastructure, deployment workflows, software supply-chain tooling, and internal operational practices," Valadon wrote. Dark Reading contacted CISA for comment but the agency did not respond at press time. It's unclear if the secrets have been accessed in the six months the repo's been online. Studies have shown that attackers monitor cloud assets like GitHub repos for exposed secrets and can jump on leaks within mere minutes of the data going online. Valadon tells Dark Reading that an "authoritative answer will require GitHub's cooperation," because external views of repos are limited. "What we can see from outside is that the repository was never forked, based on public GitHub events. That's a weak but real signal that it didn't circulate widely," he says. "We can't observe clones from the outside, so we can't rule out that an individual downloaded a copy, but that's an inference, not a confirmation." Related:AI Drives Cybersecurity Investments, Widening 'Valley of Death' CISA's High-Risk Practices Led to Exposure The good news is that after alerting CISA, the agency took down the repo in just over 24 hours, although Valadon noted that it took some assistance from cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, who connected with his contacts at the agency and elevated the issue. "Credit to CISA for moving fast — most of our disclosures take far longer, and some are never fixed," Valadon wrote. The bad news is, CISA personnel were engaging in high-risk behavior. "The repository was a catalogue of unsafe practices: plain-text passwords, backups committed to Git, and explicit instructions to disable GitHub's secret scanning," he wrote. Valadon tells Dark Reading that based on an analysis of the repo, the most likely explanation is that because some of the commits contained hardcoded secrets, GitHub's push protection feature was blocking the pushes. "Rather than remove the secrets, someone documented how to disable the control so the commits would go through," he says. Related:Dark Reading Celebrates 20 Years as a Leading Authority on Cybersecurity, Highlighting the People, Events, Ideas, and Technologies Shaping the Modern Risk Landscape This, Valadon adds, is bad practice that mature organizations shun. Instead, they treat such security features like GitHub's secret scanning or GitGuardian's push protection service as "a non-negotiable control." "The pattern we see is individual developers turning it off under deadline pressure when a push fails. The correct response is to remove the secret from the commit, not the detector," he says. The exposed repo follows massive cuts to CISA's budget and workforce under the second Trump administration. As of last year, the agency lost approximately a third of its employees, while the White House's fiscal 2027 budget proposal would slash CISA's funding by more than $700 million. About the Author Rob Wright Senior News Director, Dark Reading Rob Wright is a longtime reporter with more than 25 years of experience as a technology journalist. Prior to joining Dark Reading as senior news director, he spent more than a decade at TechTarget's SearchSecurity in various roles, including senior news director, executive editor and editorial director. Before that, he worked for several years at CRN, Tom's Hardware Guide, and VARBusiness Magazine covering a variety of technology beats and trends. Prior to becoming a technology journalist in 2000, he worked as a weekly and daily newspaper reporter in Virginia, where he won three Virginia Press Association awards in 1998 and 1999. He graduated from the University of Richmond in 1997 with a degree in journalism and English. A native of Massachusetts, he lives in the Boston area.  Want more Dark Reading stories in your Google search results? 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