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Truffle Security identified 543,699 unique credentials that still worked when tested in July 2026, among data from public GitHub repositories. The figure is not a count of credentials attackers stole or used, nor a live inventory of GitHub on October 2, 2026. The findings, reported by BleepingComputer on September 30, 2026, show that exposed secrets can remain usable for years and that GitHub Push Protection does not cover every credential type.
What the 543,699 figure measures
Truffle Security examined a dataset assembled for large language model training from a crawl that ended August 7, 2025. It covered 224 million repositories and more than 58 billion files. The researchers checked credentials from that corpus in July 2026 and found 543,699 unique credentials that were still valid. Those credentials appeared repeatedly across more than 1.1 million files and repositories, including forks, according to the report.
The dates matter: August 7, 2025 is when the underlying crawl closed; July 2026 is when validity was checked. The figure therefore describes credentials in that historical dataset that still worked at the time of testing. It is not a real-time count of public secrets as of October 2, 2026, and it does not establish that attackers found or used them, or that their owners were compromised.
How long exposed credentials remained usable
The median time a unique credential remained publicly accessible was 784 days, according to Truffle Security’s 2026 analysis. About 10% of working credentials were older than 6.3 years, and the oldest identified credential dated to 2009. These results show why age alone is not a reliable reason to assume an exposed secret has expired.
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Validity differed sharply by service. Only 1 of 101,886 exposed npm tokens still worked, while 69,041 of 126,963 exposed Google Cloud service account credentials remained valid. These are study-specific counts from credentials in the analyzed dataset, not general expiration rates for all npm or Google Cloud credentials.
What GitHub Push Protection did—and did not—prevent
Push Protection scans incoming code for recognized secret patterns and blocks matching pushes. It was enabled by default in February 2024, according to the report. The feature can prevent some covered secrets from being committed, but it is not a retroactive revocation mechanism: it cannot make a credential safe after that credential has already been exposed.
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Truffle Security found 199,843 credentials, or 36.8% of the valid credentials in its analysis, were exposed after default Push Protection activation. That does not mean every exposure was a blocked push or a bypass; coverage limitations matter. In the credential categories the protection covers, the report found a 53% decline in exposure rates after default activation. That reduction applies to protected categories, not all secrets.
Coverage was a significant limitation: 51.8% of the working credentials fell into categories that GitHub’s default Push Protection did not block, including database connection strings and Google API keys. Pattern-based detection can only block the formats it recognizes, so repository owners should treat it as one layer of prevention rather than complete coverage.
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What to do if a credential is exposed
- Revoke or rotate it immediately. Removing the string from the current file does not disable an active credential. Use the credential provider’s controls to invalidate the exposed value and issue a replacement where needed.
- Search repository history. Check past commits, not only the current working tree. Review repositories and copies your organization controls, including relevant forks.
- Clean up the repository separately. After revocation or rotation, remove the exposed string from the repository as appropriate. Source cleanup and credential revocation solve different problems: history cleanup does not invalidate a secret.
- Set automatic expiration where available. Configure active secrets to expire on a schedule if the issuing system supports it, reducing the time a forgotten credential can remain usable.
- Keep Push Protection enabled, but account for its scope. It can block recognized patterns on new pushes; the reported findings show that default coverage does not include every credential category.
- Separate exposure from confirmed abuse. The study tested whether credentials remained valid; it did not establish how many were obtained or misused by attackers. Use separate evidence before describing an incident as confirmed misuse or compromise.
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